The first references that spring to mind are Lawrence Kasdan’s ‘The Big Chill’ and Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Peter’s Friends’. The same disenchantment among the characters, the same nostalgia for good times lost. Instead of getting together around a dead friend’s funeral or a Christmas dinner, the friends in ‘Food of Love’ gather in an English village to put on a Shakespeare play. The pretext is different from the Kasdan and Branagh movies, but the purpose is the same: to measure the vanity of ambition and assess the extent of failure. Bankers, computer scientists or translators, Steven Poliakoff’s forty-somethings seem to have it made but behind the facade of material success, their ideals have gone to pieces. It is up to Shakespeare to remodel their souls and remind them of the meaning of life. (“Les Echos”, July 29th, 1998)