Set! Is the brand new mockumentary from legendary writer and director Christopher Guest. It is a spiritual sequel to the 2000 cult classic film Best in Show that tracked dogs competing in the Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show and the wacky characters that populate the film. The participants fight with one another over minor details of how to style their dogs fur, they belittle their fellow competitors and get into passive aggressive fights with the organizers. Here the group of unknown actors perform similar send ups about competitive table setting scene in Orange County, California.
Wait, I appear to have this all wrong. Set! is somehow a real documentary directed by Scott Gawlik that really does follow a group of characters (that are very real people) as they compete in the annual Orange County State Fair in Tablescaping, the art of setting a table for fine dining. You have people like Bonnie whose obsession with movies helps create her inspiration, Marie and Christel a mother daughter team who started out competing together twenty two years earlier but it was so disastrous that they only ever entered as solo participants since then, that is until they give it one more shot as a duo. Of course Marie and Christel’s husbands know that they work together like oil and water and when they eventually can’t agree on anything they can only shrug their shoulders. You also have contestants like Hilary who treat the contest like modern contemporary art, with literal interpretations of the criteria and more than a handful of taxidermy that make the cut.
We get introduced to almost a dozen contestants and their families that support them to varying degrees as they spend almost half a year prepping for their local fair. The rules are simple, you are given a theme, then you must design a layout for the table with appropriate creative and original centerpieces and the serving ware and cutlery must be placed exactly how fine dining guides specify all while the judges are able to completely throw all the criteria out the window and decide on a whim on who wins.
We see the insane lengths and sometimes money the contestants are willing to drop like Janet who keeps all her past designs still set up throughout her house, much to her husband’s dismay as he keeps threatening to the camera that she needs to take some down, and Janet later jokes if it comes down to her tables or her husband, she’ll pick her tables. As the film progresses we see the internal struggle they face of realizing their visions and struggling with how to show restraint. For most of those competing money is no object, as we learn that Marie once spent $13,000 on getting a manufacturer to dip silver cutlery into real gold just to have the perfect setting.
There is only one male we see competing and that is Tim, younger than most of those he is facing off against and unfortunately out of work, so he can’t drop hundreds if not thousands of dollars into his designs. Tim is also a cosplayer so he enters a costume contest to help win $500 that would go directly to his Tablescaping, a sum that still would pale in comparison to some of the others.
We get all the trademark shots of a contestant saying something wild then cutting to their husbands blankly saying platitudes about how they need to support their partner. The film feels exactly like a Christopher Guest film, as referenced at the beginning of the review, to the point that you could see Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara showing up and saying the exact same dialogue. The film starts out strong introducing everyone, but the longer we spend with the kooky characters the film loses a little bit of steam, but luckily once the judging actually begins everything ramps back up as everyone comes in with a mentality of “Best of Show or Bust” and getting a second place ribbon is a akin to national embarrassment worthy of societal shunning. It’s a world you don’t need to know anything about to still have an utter delight and burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all.
Set! was seen during the 2021 Hot Docs Festival. Thank you to the festival and Gat PR for the screener. Set! currently has no wide North American release date.
