NATHAN WEINBENDER:
It’s been said that you can put your soul into your cooking, and that when a meal has been made with great care and intention, you can tell. The Taste of Things is a French film about our relationship to food—how we make it, how we consume it, how we communicate our love for others in the food we make for them.
In particular, it’s about two people whose relationship develops primarily through the food they make for each other. Their greatest pleasure in life appears to be making elaborate meals and then watching one another eat them.
It’s sometime the late 19th century, and Dodin Bouffant (played by Benoît Magimel) is a gourmand who lives in a beautiful farmhouse where he often gathers stuffy intellectuals to indulge in the food prepared by Eugenie, his personal chef of nearly 20 years. She is played by Juliette Binoche, and she has mostly shrugged off her employer’s romantic advances, except for the nights when she conveniently leaves her bedroom door unlocked.
The movie contains several long scenes where we simply watch food being prepared, and some of the recipes have dozens upon dozens of steps. Vegetables are boiled, meats brined and braised, pastry dough delicately placed over pots, pinches of seasoning added just so. You can practically hear murmurs pass through the audience, and you almost wish there were subtitles on the screen detailing the preparation so that we might rush home and try it out ourselves. The film is as much about the way in which food is prepared as it is the cultivation of the food—how everything had to be grown or raised, and how some meals required days or even weeks of planning.
The Taste of Things isn’t just about food—it’s about the shifting dynamics between Bouffant and Eugenie, and between Eugenie and the much younger women who also work in the house. The story is taken from a novel by Marcel Rouff, published in 1924, and it feels very much of its era—this is the sort of drama that involves unspoken desires amongst polite society, about the importance of marriage, and about an illness that’s introduced in act one so that you know it will come to a head in act three.
The Taste of Things was directed by Anh Hung Tran, whose style is as exacting and careful as the chefs we’re watching. He is perhaps still best known for his 1993 debut feature The Scent of Green Papaya, another meditative movie about the relationship between a woman and the wealthy family she works for, and another methodical study in the way it shows meals being prepared.
Magimel and Binoche, who were in a relationship themselves several decades ago, are very good in understated roles, although I didn’t feel that either of their characters develop into flesh-and-blood human beings. But it doesn’t seem to matter, because this is a film that delights in technique and in the looks of ecstasy that pass over the characters’ faces as they take a bite. Also, it will make you really, really hungry. Don’t see it on an empty stomach.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.
