DAN WEBSTER:
If there’s one thing that movies can capture well, it’s the portrayal of a tasty meal. Even without the sense of smell, just the sight of, say, a roasted pork loin can excite even a vegan’s taste buds.
Well, maybe not a vegan’s. But as someone who refrained from eating meat for 35 years, I can attest that it might work for your ordinary vegetarian.
A pork loin is only one dish that is featured in The Taste of Things, a film that was France’s entry for the 2024 Best International Feature Film Academy Awards.
Although the film won Vietnamese-born writer-director Tran Anh Hung Best Director honors at the Cannes Film Festival, it didn’t make Oscar’s final cut. But no matter. Tran will just have to make do both with his Cannes award and a 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating among critics. No mean feat, either one.
Then again, this is familiar territory for Tran, who emigrated to France in 1975 at the age of 12. His critically acclaimed 1993 film The Scent of Green Papaya is an evocative, meditative feature about life in a dysfunctional Vietnamese family that ends up being a tale of burgeoning love.
The Taste of Things, too, is a tale of love, though—typically French—it pairs food with the long-held devotion between a famous chef, a skilled cook and their mutual desire to create an ever-evolving variety of sumptuous dishes.
In their case, however, no hint of dysfunction arises, even if the presence of longing and potential for loss certainly does.
Taking the 1924 Marcel Rouff novel La Vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, gourmet as an inspiration, Tran throws us into the 1885 French countryside. It is there, in his estate, that Dodin (played by Benoît Magimel) entertains his circle of friends by creating recipes that he then hands over to his longtime cooking partner, Eugenie (played by Juliette Binoche). Though he is known as the “Napoleon of Gastronomy,” Dodin depends on Eugenie to bring his recipes to life.
The two, of course, are more than mere culinary partners. Though she has spurned for some 20 years his offers of marriage, she lives in his house and—on the nights that the door to her room isn’t locked—she welcomes his presence in her bed.
Which is about all the plot development that Tran gives us. Their mutual devotion set against her confirmed independence, with only a few asides to fill in the film’s 2-hour-and-15-minute running time. There’s the 8-hour-long dinner that Dodin and his friends— invitees of a Middle Eastern prince—endure, the young neighbor girl Pauline (played by Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire) who shows a precocious ability to distinguish the contents of a particular sauce, and the mysterious fainting spells that affect Eugenie and worry Dodin.
Instead of an overactive narrative, then, much of The Taste of Things portrays the action in Dodin’s kitchen, from the preparation of a simple omelet to such complex creations as ballotine of duck (which involves a deboned duck stuffed with various ingredients, tied and cooked), crayfish with sweetbreads, chicken studded with truffles and baked Alaska.
It's the baked Alaska that causes the winsome Pauline to proclaim the taste nearly brought her to tears.
And that’s the key to Tran’s film: emotion. Or, at any rate, the transference of emotions such as joy and grief to that of our basic human need for sustenance. It is, after all, far easier to assuage our hunger for food than it is to quench our need for friendship, for companionship and most of all for love, no matter how we define it.
And no culture equates the vast range of emotions with food more than the French, which is something that Tran—Vietnamese by birth but French not just by association but, likely enough, nature—seems to have taken to heart.
Or should that be soul.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is a senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com/7blog.