A perennially sun-dappled kitchen. Cast-iron pans. Belle-époque bustles. Gastroporn doesn’t come more XXX-rated than this insanely pretty, airily vacant livre de recettes.
The purposely plodding Taste of Things – originally screened in Cannes as Pot-au-Feu – in which the main characters prepare food, eat food and talk about food, is so French it could only have been made by a Vietnamese director.
Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche make for quite the charm offensive, emulsified by their off-screen history as former marrieds. He is Dodin, a celebrated restaurateur who hosts various nobles and knobs at the elaborate table of his picturesque country home; she is his loyal paramour, Eugénie, who, well, does the cooking. Together they exchange twinkling looks and sage nods, until – plot klaxon! – Binoche’s early-and-often cough gives cause for concern.
Between wine blather, 12-course meals and the trumpeted philosophical intersection between food and life – savoir-vivre and all that – there’s a throwdown between Dodin and a rival aristocratic foodie about the training of a new scullery maid.
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It’s beautifully choreographed and shot by director Tran Anh Hung and his cinematographer, Jonathan Ricquebourg. It’s rather too beautiful. For a woman who spends hours with her arm up a swan’s bum or gutting fish, Binoche, even with her cough, is unfailingly radiant and unsullied.
Babette toiled on her feast, but this kitchen has no sweat or stress. It’s labour without graft. The chopping boards and surfaces are unbelievably, sparklingly clean, tipping the film into the realm of science fiction. One almost expects Cthulhu to be among the distinguished dinner guests.
In a plot twist already used in Ratatouille, the unpretentious dish of the original title finally takes centre stage. But the romanticised simple life of country cooking, in stark contrast to the same director’s swooning The Vertical Ray of the Sun, is undermined by the enormous bourgeois privilege of the people on-screen.
Copper-bottomed-pot fetishists may require smelling salts; people who are less impressed by veal or smothered labrador (or whatever else is on the fussy menu) will shrug and wonder why France selected this over Anatomy of a Fall in its predictably unsuccessful Oscar bid.
The Taste of Things is on limited release from Wednesday, February 14th
