Tasteful

Have you ever wanted to spend 45 minutes of your life watching Juliette Binoche make soup? If so, then ‘The Taste of Things’ is your dream movie. In this extremely French film, Binoche plays Eugenie, a genius cook in the employ and the embrace of one Monsieur Dodin (Benoit Maginel), “the Napoleon of gastronomy”, a wealthy aristocrat who really really likes his food and wine.

The film takes place in the early 1880s, making the experience of watching it feel slightly pre-modern. There is no electricity and no mass communication. The characters do not drive or even ride bicycles or horses. All the action takes place in a stroll around the French countryside, as though you suddenly found yourself in a Renoir painting. You can see and hear the environment. Unfortunately, you cannot taste, smell, or touch it, which is all you really want to do when the movie presents you with a crayfish-stuffed vol-au-vent.

THE TASTE OF THINGS ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Tran Anh Hung
Written by: Marcel Rouff, Tran Anh Hung
Starring: Juliette Binoche, Benoit Maginel
Running time: 136 mins

The Taste of Things, very tastefully directed by Vietnamese French filmmaker Tran Anh Hung (who received an Oscar nomination three decades ago for The Scent of Green Papaya), is a chronicle of the culinary Great Awakening that took place in France at the end of the 19th century, when the country was, for once, at peace and prosperous and people could focus on the finer things, like eating and drinking oneself into a stupor.

At one point, Dodin points out that the great Escoffier is only 36 years old and is beginning to come into prominence, which means that the golden age of French cookery has begun. Dodin and his friends, a passel of portly, well-dressed, prosperous bankers and doctors, ruminate on the Pouilly-Fuisse or whatever while strolling about, and enjoy a surreptitious, moaning farmhouse feast of ortolan with their heads hidden under napkins. I found myself constantly wondering how these men did not die from farting after eating like this every day. Eating like truffled pigs has its health consequences, but Hung is not interested in the perils of the gastronomic life.

Dodin is the gorging artist, but Binoche’s Eugenie is the artisan. He comes up with the recipes and she executes them to perfection and brilliance. Their relationship is a poignant, sophisticated, though somewhat doomed love story. It had the poignant, sophisticated though somewhat doomed bourgeois audience at my screening clucking with subtle recognition as they munched their popcorn, which the Alamo Drafthouse did not cook with particular loving care.

Though the film’s central relationship is quite affecting, The Taste of Things is really a movie about food, the making, the harvesting, and the conceiving. All the farms are family farms. Dodin grows most of his own vegetables and meat. The fish appears to come from elsewhere, though there are calm waters nearby, so perhaps Dodin accounts for his own carp as well. It’s a far cry from our own food experience, where we harvest from Costco or Trader Joe’s, and cannot even begin to source the delights we experience when we dine out at overpriced warehouse-sized restaurants.

The Taste of Things captures a moment in time when food truly mattered to people, and it feels that people matter as well. Dodin and Eugenie’s relationship is subtly moving, and I also liked the scenes involving Pauline, a pre-teen farm girl who is a kind of supertaster, and who Eugenie and Dodin groom (in a good way), as a gastronomic prodigy. The director had his cast actually learn how to cook these meals in a slightly pre-modern but still beautifully stocked kitchen, and they practiced until they got things right. If the pot-au-feu boiled over, they did it again. It puts to shame flashy American “cooking” films like Chef, where Jon Favreau made cubanos in a trailer and had to decide who loved him more, Sofia Vergara or Scarlett Johansson. This is real food, really made by real people.

The movie is a bit long, the very definition of slow cinema. Nothing explodes, and no one even raises their voice except for one scene where Dodin, obviously grieving, is a touch grumpy. The first half hour involves the preparation of one meal before you even learn the character’s names, and there is more than one instance where Dodin and Pauline eat a dish and try to suss out the ingredients contained in the sauce. It’s a bit much, a little rich, but maybe that’s the point. If you don’t leave The Taste of Things feeling hungry, then you are, as they say in France, a little dead inside.