The Post-Comfort Era

Do you know that feeling, when you finally sit in front of your cheese-dusted bowl of spagbol, knowing that the patience you put into preparing the sauce – sautéing the onions and all the tralala – will be rewarded with that first, comforting bite? Now, hold onto your fork and imagine having to prolong this test of patience – delaying the soothing of your stomach just to take countless photos of your plate from every angle. You move it toward the natural light, swap out the tablecloth, wipe down the spoon until it gleams — all so you can perfectly curate your next meticulously planned Instagram post.

Prior to pressing the publish button, you've made sure to add #comfortfood in order to be found by millions of comfort-seekers. For those who devote their lives to the performance of bourgeois comfort, the actual moment of eating, which has been sacralised by many religions as an act of communion and sharing, is no longer a priority. The eating process has been fragmented into 15-to-1-minute-micro-films, each showing different sensorial aspects, which range from the stunningly effective prep of anti-wastage meals, to the guttural noise of swallowing noodles.This fragmentation of experience, which has already been explored by a whole bunch of modernists – be they writers, philosophers or filmmakers, or often all three together – has today reached its climax.

In fact, when watching Luc de Heusch's Les Gestes du Repas (Mealtime Gestures) (1958), a documentary on eating habits across Belgian social classes, it feels like a relic from a distant past, an archival artifact so removed from today's reality that it seems almost ancient. Markets, Bistrot lunches, first communion family meals, Christmas dinners offered by the Salvation Army, these are all scenes where people took the time to eat. When the camera captured meal times, people actually ate – there wasn't necessarily that additional layer of what academics call self-reflexivity. Like Italian Neorealism, anthropological cinema offered a valuable insight into human behaviour, capturing unfiltered, unsanitised moments when people appeared more unconcerned with the camera. 

When self-reflexivity occurred, it was usually prompted by the director, engaging the notion of collectivity in the filmmaking process and blurring the line between reality and fiction (hello, Bertolt Brecht!). Though rarely named, especially by younger generations, self-reflexivity is no longer confined to the films of Jean-Luc Godard or Michelangelo Antonioni. It has become the lifeblood of social media. People may not consciously think about being self-aware, yet they exist in a state of constant self-awareness. We have moved far beyond Descartes' maxim, "I think, therefore I am", and entered the era of "I see, I am seen, I see myself being seen, I see others seeing me see myself, therefore, I am."

It is precisely because we have entered this new phase of "being in the world" – as fathered by TikTok and Instagram – that the concept of comfort, once shaped by our grandparents in the early stages of capitalism, has transformed. Today, comfort is no longer about personal relaxation but about voyeuristic pleasure and proxy satisfaction, driven by massive corporations selling user-generated content and instant gratification. In Ruben Östlund's Triangle of Sadness (2022), Yaya, the social media influencer played by the late Charlbi Dean, performs the "spaghetti glam" trend – posing with a plate of pasta in the cruise's lavish restaurant, not to eat it, but to project an image of wealth, glamour, and "calculated spontaneity" for her followers. The scene highlights how social media culture prioritises aesthetic performance over authentic experience, turning dining into a curated display of economic comfort rather than truly embracing the comfort of Italian food. 

In this culture, which is a global neoliberal culture, that is to say non-regional, we question less and less about the provenance of our food but rather how the consumption of certain food defines how people perceive us. It is within this loophole, this rupture, where provenance becomes an increasingly distant reality for hurried city-dwellers, that Boris Lojkine's L'Histoire de Souleymane (Souleymane's Story) (2024) finds its full meaning, in a manner both petrifying and haunting.

Souleymane represents the social and economic mechanisms that have provided a new type of consumer comfort since the 2010s. Award-winner yet struggling Guinean immigrant Abou Sangaré, who recently obtained a one-year resident visa, reenacts his own ordeal and that of countless immigrants striving to regularise their status in France. Souleymane toils endlessly as a food delivery worker, navigating a harsh reality of debt, exhaustion, and survival, all while society remains largely indifferent.

Although Lojkine reveals Souleymane’s life story in measured fragments, his migration path – with its crossing of the Sahara, the Libyan prisons, the smugglers and the arrival to the Mediterranean shores – occupies far less space than the visual narrative of his bike rides across Paris. Lojkine strategically plays with the concept of space-time by following Souleymane’s frantic race through the city streets: getting on and off his bike, narrowly avoiding collisions, waiting for restaurant orders, rushing up and down staircases, constantly in motion. What truly matters to food-delivery users is not Souleymane's past in Guinea or the hardships of his migration, but the speed of his journey as a delivery driver through Paris. With an empty stomach, it is Souleymane who ensures that you stay comfortably seated, the one who ensures that your comfort food comes knocking at your door, the one who remains unseen so that your comfort remains uninterrupted. The logics of exploitation may have shifted, but its essence remains: slavery once stripped Africans of their histories, identities, and traditions, reducing them to mere commodities. 

When I watched Vittorio de Sica's Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) for the first time in 2010, I don't remember considering the impressions it might have left to the Italian audience in 1948. I looked at it as a historical archive, with its non-actors, its real urban environments, in the same way that I looked at Berlin in ruins in Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero) (1949) by Roberto Rossellini. In November 2024, as we left the MK2 Quai de Loire with my mother after watching Souleymane, my guts grasped what I didn't grasp at the time. We were in the Jaures neighbourhood, right at Souleymane's workplace, and he was riding his bike and motorcycle while we were watching him on the big screen. The audience gazed through the screen at what they were trying not to confront in their everyday lives, as if the screen itself served as a protective barrier (but from what?).

I’m not sure we fully grasp the paradox: we go to the cinema to see more clearly what we choose to ignore outside our doors. Or perhaps, put differently, we go to the cinema to seek a discomfort that feels safer than the one we live with every day. Through this essay, I call for a redefinition of comfort – not just to push beyond its conventional boundaries, but to break the illusion that comfort and discomfort exist as separate worlds. Our comfort is inextricably tied to someone else's suffering. Let's stand together in this era of post-comfort – an era where impoverishment and violence are repackaged as comfort, where we are encouraged to look away from those who sustain our bourgeois illusion of ease. In 2022, a photo captured my mother marching in Geneva, holding a "Woman, Life, Freedom" sign. In Paris, staring at her through my phone’s glass, I felt proud. I longed to reach through the screen, take her hand, and stand beside her.