Love letter to all things French is a sexy and tasty treat
Let’s begin with some serious advice. Please have something to eat before you go and see The Taste Of Things. If you don’t, I can guarantee you’ll be gnawing hungrily at your knuckles within 15 minutes of Tran Anh Hung’s sumptuous, drool-inducing feast of a film getting under way.
It’s tempting to describe the extended scenes in the kitchen of a particularly gorgeous 19thCentury French chateau as ‘food porn’, but that wouldn’t be fair to a picture good enough to win the Vietnamese-born Hung the Best Director prize at last year’s Cannes festival.
No, this feels more like an homage to the country he’s called home for almost 50 years. It’s a love letter to classic French cuisine, to French cinema and, it has to be said, to beautiful French women of a certain age. Yes, the only thing chef and gourmand Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) loves more than sharing an eight-course lunch with friends is the beautiful Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), his right-hand woman in his kitchen.
Eugénie has worked for him for 20 years and the pair occasionally share a bed but, hard as he tries, he cannot persuade her to marry him. Until…
Binoche’s presence inevitably serves as a reminder of the similarly appetising Chocolat, but there are also echoes of some of the great food classics of cinema – Babette’s Feast, Eat Drink Man Woman (and its wonderful Hispanic remake, Tortilla Soup) and Like Water For Chocolate. Yes, it slightly outstays its welcome but the final, remarkable shot will have you drooling once again. Exquisite.
Full marks to Sony for at least attempting to make that rare thing, a genuinely female-led superhero movie. But far fewer marks for it turning out to be Madame Web, the latest spin-off from the socalled ‘Spiderverse’.
An underpowered Dakota Johnson plays Cassie Webb, a young New York paramedic who starts seeing glimpses of the future after a near-fatal accident at work. Could it have anything to do with her spider-hunting mother dying while giving birth to her deep in the Peruvian jungle?
It looks cheap, the clumsy screenplay fails to convince, and while director SJ Clarkson struggles with big-screen action, French actor Tahar Rahim, as the main baddie, has a damagingly unhappy time in the dubbing studio.
In The Promised Land, Mads Mikkelsen plays a newly retired army captain who hopes to win fortune and royal favour by bringing the barren heaths of 18thCentury Jutland into agricultural use, a project long favoured by the Danish king.
What ensues is tense, gritty and really well acted by a cast that, alongside Mikkelsen, includes Amanda Collin as the captain’s uncompromising housekeeper and Simon Bennebjerg as the sadistic nobleman who wants the heath for himself.
Worth tracking down.