Lucian Echevarría (writer/director Jason Cortlund) knows his mushrooms.  With his wife Regina (Tiffany Esteb), he tirelessly plods through the forestland of North America, using his expert knowledge of fungi to seek and find rare mushrooms to sell to high-end restaurants. 

It’s a job that directly feeds his passion, but even at the best of times, when the ground is wet and the winds are right, it’s not a particularly stable wage with which to feed himself and Regina.  You get the impression she supports his job, this hobby of a job, rather than being particularly passionate about it.

… walking through woodland, in a solemn silence broken only by the muttering of latin names for mushrooms …

Neither of them is any stranger to picking up kitchen work during the off season to make ends meet.  When Regina starts making noises about seeking a bit of work DURING mushroom picking time, however, cracks begin to form in their relationship. The main narrative is the slow dissolution of their partnership, as financial strains worry Regina, while Lucian seems blind to them.  There’s quite a lot of walking through woodland, in a solemn silence broken only by the muttering of latin names for mushrooms.  The film starts around October, which is apparently around the end of mushroom season in the area, so we get to watch the two as they go from kitchen job to kitchen job trying to make ends meet.

…Swine who couldn’t sniff out a truffle if they tried…

Both of the foragers at one point or another during this job chain find themselves faced with philistines, who just want what they want, and don’t really care about the subtleties of cooking, or the intricacies of ingredient selection.  You get the impression that they both feel like they’re casting pearls before swine.  Swine who couldn’t sniff out a truffle if they tried.

Cortlund is a hard actor to evaluate.  Lucian is so unemotive that it’s easy at time to think that this golem of a man, so ruthlessly focused on his task, is not trying.  As the film progresses though, what first seemed like “phoning it in” starts to look a bit more like subtlety.  He makes it through the entire film without cracking a smile, but then I achieved the same task, so who am I to judge?

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