Film Review - The Taste of Things
Images courtesy of Rialto distribution.
How does one reckon with their love for another, if not through the passion that brought them together? This is the notion underpinning Trần Anh Hùng’s seventh feature film The Taste of Things, which follows gourmand Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) and his cook and lover Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). Dodin’s passion for gastronomy, which he indulges in with his friends, is aided massively not only by his own immense cooking skills, but also the finely-tuned culinary artistry of Eugénie, and the two share a close romantic bond - one that frequently and passionately manifests in the form of cooking itself.
Hùng is most well known for his debut feature, The Scent of Green Papaya (1993) - the first Southeast Asian film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film - and his subsequent films Cyclo (1995) and The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000), the three of which make up what is considered his “Vietnam” trilogy. Hùng was born in Vietnam but moved to France at age 12, and his films often communicate his sense of wishing to honour Vietnam as a country after its frequent mishandling in the lenses of American and French films. Subsequent films have proven further versatility - such as 2009’s I Come with the Rain, a neo-noir thriller with a most unique premise. The relative pacing, style and tone of The Taste of Things is thus nothing new to Hùng, and exhibits an almost journeyman persona. His directing comes off as effortless and routine, yet charged with a formal passion, something that fits perfectly with the film’s focus on artistry and craftsmanship in the kitchen.
The first half is delectably engaging on a superficial level. Laced with non-stop camera movement, quick cuts, and a gorgeously vibrant colour palette, it seemingly shows its recipe early on, one that I felt, when I first started the film, was shallow and devoid of a deeper meaning. Hung’s clear attention to romanticising cooking was, interestingly, something that bothered me at first, and I can see why some would find it easy to reduce the film merely to notions of cooking as a love language - in that sense some may find it rather shallow, something I certainly did for a while, and in some respects still do. Not that I disliked this notion at all, but it initially felt overly superficial and I was worried that the film would have little to offer beyond its beautiful attention to gastronomy. It is only in the second half when I feel this somewhat comes around on itself, in doing so marginally baking an ethos for the first half and grounding it in a concrete emotional dough. In France, The Taste of Things is called La Passion de Dodin Bouffant - literally The Passion of Dodin Bouffant - and while somewhat cheesy in a uniquely French way, I think it summarises the film’s intent soundly. The second half gradually becomes stripped back and less colourful than the first, utilising longer takes and a more static camera, creating this immense sense of contemplation and laying bare the film’s central relationship. Providing a framework through which to interpret the first half’s insistence on what is essentially food porn, the second half reckons with Dodin’s perception of what it is he loves, and remarkably, it opts for the sentiment that his relationship with Eugénie and gastronomy is messy and complicated, but nonetheless intertwined, where one complements the other. This isn’t done by reducing Eugénie to a mere prop as if she were an activity - Eugénie is a fully-fledged character who is posited occasionally as a foil to Dodin, where her attention to cooking is markedly more utilitarian and mechanical yet never feels any less romantic. Though it often feels like Binoche is criminally underutilised in a dramatic sense, it creates an interesting mingling between the two as they maturely navigate their relationship through cooking, something which is certainly ripe for analysis in and of itself - I’m not much of a culinary connoisseur and would love for someone who is to pick apart the thematic use of the film’s various dishes and flavours.
The Taste of Things serves up a complicated feast for the eyes, intrinsically tying its romanticisation of cooking as a love language to the identities and passions of its two leads. Whilst I think its ethos surrounding the central relationship and its connection to cooking is often remarkably shallow and lacklustre, it’s still fuzzy and lovey-dovey in a charmingly considered manner. Through the various avenues it takes in exploring the meaning of cooking, how one works on it as a trade and where our own passions for craftsmanship stem from, comes this sense that we are what we bring into the world. If nothing else you will certainly be hungry after watching this.
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The Taste of Things is screening in cinemas now. For tickets and more info, click here.