In the last two years, the National Restaurant Assn. estimates that roughly 90, 000 restaurants have experienced a long-term shutdown or permanent closure due to the pandemic. Belle Vie, the charming French bistro tucked between a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a McDonald’s along a West L. A. stretch of Wilshire Boulevard, was one of them — but you’d never know it by Vincent Samarco’s disposition.“[I’m] ready to do anything to try to save the business, ” Samarco said on camera in July 2020, dumping fertilizer into large wooden containers. “Look at me, trying to plant some trees in an alley behind a McDonald’s. ”That scene and so many others are stitched together in a new documentary that’s a portrait of an optimistic and determined restaurateur trying something — anything — to keep his small business afloat. That documentary, simply titled “Belle Vie, ” premieres March 9 at the Santa Barbara Film Festival and offers a uniquely intimate glimpse — seen through the lens of Samarco, his wife and his chef — of the struggles of restaurants and bars hoping to survive since the dining shutdown in March 2020. Throughout pivots, personal loss, bankruptcy and near-constant roadblocks and red tape, the Parisian never seems to lose his sense of humor. “I think if the restaurant industry doesn’t work for me, I could definitely be Santa — I mean, my beard is starting to be white already, ” Samarco says in another scene, strapping a Christmas tree to the roof of his little green truck. Indeed, Samarco’s humor and geniality are what inspired filmmaker Marcus Mizelle to turn his camera on the third-generation restaurateur. The director, producer and writer was already a regular at the restaurant, where he happened to place an order for pickup in spring of 2020; he made small talk with Samarco about how Belle Vie was faring, and Mizelle got halfway to the front door before the light bulb went off. He turned around and asked if he could start filming the restaurant’s progress.“What popped in my head, from a storyteller standpoint, is No. 1, you have this wonderful protagonist — colorful, nice, wonderful — it was a no-brainer, ” said the director, whose previous documentary, “Something in the Water: A Kinston Basketball Story, ” won a Midsouth Regional Emmy Award last week. “But you also have this conflict — the pandemic — and you also have this adaptation he was about to go toward. That’s like one half of the hero’s journey right there. It just instinctively made sense. ”Samarco opened Belle Vie on Aug. 1, 2016, renovating a 1960s restaurant space on a shoestring budget; it wasn’t much, but it was what he could afford, and he was determined to make it his own. He built a marble-topped bar and wooden cubbies for row upon row of French wine, placed an upright piano near the door and hung an atmospheric stained-glass light fixture from the ceiling.
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