Binoche serves up some exquisite culinary drama
REVIEW ‘The Taste of Things’ meal for Dodin and his coterie of culinary devotees, as we see in a gloriously luxuriant sequence that has the panache and precision of a great musical number. The music, in this case, arises not from a conventional score, but rather from the diegetic accompaniments of soup bubbling in a pot, butter sizzling in a pan and utensils scraping against crockery.
Hung, a French Vietnamese filmmaker whose eye for cinematic sensualism was on display in early works like “The Scent of
Green Papaya” and “Cyclo,” here achieves something of a culinary contact high. If “The Taste of Things” is two-plus hours’ worth of haute-cuisine eye candy, it could also be plausibly defended as one of the year’s great action movies: In a perfectly modulated and sustained 40-minute opening sequence, Eugénie guts a fish, boils eggs, funnels sauce, spoons quenelles and torches meringues, commanding the kitchen with effortless, near-wordless assurance. The dishes come together like ‘THE TASTE OF THINGS’ (In French with English subtitles)
Not rated
Running time: 136 minutes How to watch: Now in theaters dazzling, sometimes ingeniously surprising set-pieces, nudged along by the robust, sweeping movements of Jonathan Ricquebourg’s camera and the turbotcharged rhythms of Mario Battistel’s editing. (Cooking was supervised by the famed French chef Pierre Gagnaire, who served as the movie’s culinary director.)
In time, the action spills out into the dining room, where Dodin and his companions (played by actors including Patrick d’Assumçao, Frédéric Fisbach and Emmanuel Salinger) devour and discourse in the grand and very Gallic tradition. A few wisps of plot materialize in between sips of wine and dollops of philosophizing. Mostly, though, there is a warm atmosphere of unhurried indulgence and guilt-free pleasure, as well as an unspoken acknowledgment that pleasure is serious business. Dodin is known throughout France as “the Napoleon of the culinary arts,” and Eugénie, his unofficial but longstanding Joséphine, has established her own formidable reputation.
It’s the artist in Eugénie that we love, and that Dodin loves as well. Dish by dish, the two have forged a bond more intimate and sustained than some lifelong couples, though Eugénie, who lives in Dodin’s chateau, continues to assert her independence by resisting his frequent marriage proposals. It’s as if their devotion to each other, and to their shared appetite for great food, were too pure and exalted to require the institutional sanction of matrimony. They cook; therefore, they are.
It’s worth noting that Hung’s movie (known as “La Passion de Dodin Bouffant” in French) at one point bore the Englishlanguage working title of “The Pot-au-Feu.” I wish that title had stuck, though you should see “The Taste of Things” under any name. As one crucial scene reminds us, what something is called — a cook, a wife, an apprentice, an artist — matters far less than the complex and sometimes sublime reality of what it is.