In 1994’s Hoop Dreams, we followed Arthur Agee and William Gates as they struggled to break free of their impoverished communities and broken pasts, seeking the opportunity to become professional basketball players. In the same spirit, Pressure Cooker follows three culinary art students at Frankford High School, an institution replete with metal detectors, thumbprint scanners, and students sporting swinging identity cards around their necks; however, Pressure Cooker does not allow for any delusions of grandeur as the amount of money to be earned as a culinary artist is minimal; instead, the focus is on the scholarships reaped through success in culinary arts competitions, which in turn open the doors to an escape from their fractured homes and financial burdens.
Pressure Cooker takes nothing away from the superb Hoop Dreams, a film that focuses on the stars in each player’s eyes as he dreams of going pro, often eliding the importance of education. Essentially, Hoop Dreams explores the precarious balancing act between obtaining an education and becoming a successful athlete, with the latter often tipping the scales and ignoring the need for a backup plan in the case that an injury sidelines a potentially stellar career, relegating the novice to the minus side of the plus or minus one percent that make the NBA.
On the other hand, Pressure Cooker illustrates these culinary scholarships as one of only a few ways to escape life in this outside-Philadelphia ghetto community, densely populated with chain houses and fast-food restaurants. And, escape is what the three subjects desperately need, not unanimously because their home lives are terrible, but rather because the community is envisioned less like a stepping stone and more like a tar pit, gripping its denizens’ soles and forever creeping farther and farther up their legs until they are financially crippled and ultimately suffocated.
Perhaps the student with the most all-around opportunities in Pressure Cooker is Tyree Dudley, an all-state nose tackle for the Frankford football team who can also fold a crepe delicately and drizzle it with a Pollock-esque chocolate flair. In total, he has given himself the opportunity to gain a number of scholarships to a handful of schools, but the refreshing part about Dudley is that he has no desire to become a professional athlete – though if the situation presented itself, he would surely jump at it. Football money is a way to gain a college education, but his focus is on opening his own restaurant. This is another departure from a film like Hoop Dreams that follows athletes wanting to reach the biggest stage. In Pressure Cooker, the judges of the culinary competition openly remind each contestant that opening a restaurant is a personal success, but not necessarily financial as the average shelf-life of a restaurant is five years (less than two in New York City). Despite this repeated information, Pressure Cooker exhibits the drive of its subjects through the academic and culinary hard work that each one invests in their futures.
In addition to Dudley, we are given Erica Gaither, a young woman who is tasked with taking care of her younger, legally blind sister. A talented chef, Erica might be the one we gravitate most toward; her family isn’t shattered, though she refers to them as the Brady Bunch because of her quantity of step and half-siblings. However, her presence at home enables her family to shirk its own responsibilities as she is the one who comes across as most responsible and able to cook, clean, and care for her sister while her parents are working their various jobs. The handful of conflicts here are heartbreaking in that we are shown a talented young woman who needs to leave in order to blossom to her full potential, but her absence will drastically impact a family struggling to make ends meet. There is no animosity exhibited in the family dynamic, though all sides know that she needs to leave to find success, so there’s a parental realization that they are holding their daughter back. Additionally, the scene in which Erica tells her sister that her ultimate desire is to attend college out of state is brutally sobering, and the blank expression signifying a feeling of abandonment hurts to sit through for fifteen seconds, but ultimately it defines interaction between those who can and those who can’t; it’s just unfortunate that Erica’s sister “can’t” through no fault of her own.
Finally, Fatoumata Dembeli is from Mali, West Africa, and hers is less of a sad plight, and more just purely aggravating in that her father and stepmother removed Fatoumata from her home in Mali and brought her to the United States so that she could cook, clean, and take care of them, making her an indentured servant, a situation that is rather disparate from Erica’s inasmuch as Fatoumata’s father is wholeheartedly against her entering any competition that would provide her the opportunity to leave the state and leave him – and his brood – to fend for themselves. Honestly, it seems that he would probably keep her out of high school completely if it weren’t the law to send her, so he does the next best thing and makes her walk a few miles to school each day. Likewise, to prevent her from further interaction with classmates, he prohibits her from going to prom. However, Dembeli’s struggles are illustrated as par-for-course in her life, and she goes on doing everything she’s tasked with (academics included), wearing a stoic face throughout, showcasing the focus and drive she carries within, and it’s not until the last few minutes of the documentary that we see her let loose some of the pent up angst, anger, and emotion she has held back by letting herself cry, waiting and hoping to receive one of the full $61,000 scholarships to Monroe College, moving her like an evacuee from hostile territory.
While these three are the subjects of Pressure Cooker, the “star” is Wilma Stephenson, the culinary arts teacher, who takes what is often stigmatized as a fluff course and mislabeled “home-economics” and fashions it into a way out by openly stating in the beginning of the film “some of you will be in here; some of you will not remain in here,” disclaiming that her class is not one to blow off or treat as a random elective. Often, she comes across as the hardass who wants to push her students to the limit, and honestly, at times it’s a bit annoying with screechy terms of endearments like “numbnut punk,” but all in all, her focus is on providing dedicated students with the opportunity to earn their share of the “three-quarters of a million dollars in scholarships” that were doled out to her eleven culinary arts’ seniors the year before. And, she can’t be faulted for that.
In the end, the drill sergeant veneer cracks and her soft underbelly is exposed during the finals and graduation, but ultimately, Stephenson refuses to give an easy way out, preaching and embodying the notion that complacency leads to stagnancy. Many students claim they want to escape; they want a change; Stephenson challenges them to prove it.
DYL MAG Score: 7