The Taste of Things is one of those examples that quietly creeps up on each year-end roundup due to the limited release and its place on a few “Best Of” lists. No such film starring Juliette Binoche should ever fly under the radar, but oftentimes when you know so little about the impact a film has on a collective audience, the film can end up surprising you. Sometimes, even landing alongside the films you would personally consider the “Best of 2023”.
Tran Anh Hung is a filmmaker I know as much about as the culinary arts scene of 1880s France. Still, there is an immediate connection purely for the hearty concoctions and pleasures that good food can provide. In any culture, food is everything we are. As Anthony Bourdain once said, ”It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.” This quote captures just how easy it is to be won over by the film getting lost in the spirit of culinary pleasures. Not only is the film’s lengthy opening sequence a reminder we should have eaten beforehand, but also a boiling observation of the romantic spaces between people and their passions.
Jonathan Ricquebourg’s cinematography makes the biggest impression on the film. The cool morning sunlight cast through the windows, or the warm embers of dusk fading into the night enrich every single moment of the film. This is reinforced by candle light when the sun has set. The fire illuminates the faintly glistened sweat on the foreheads of the characters. Their work subtly noted without feeling they’ve exhausted themselves because their joyous expression is non-negotiable. It isn’t “work” to Eugenie or Dodin, but rather a higher state of being as they connect with their guests, and even each other, with a palette too rich and deliberate to ignore. In a sense, it feels ritualistic, with each swivel gliding in and around the kitchen, and eventually landing on a final landmark of palatable constructs. The sight of crisp veal paving the way for creamy Baked Alaska is at once for the audience, and also the underpinnings of what completing a dish gives to Eugenie and Dodin.
If you note the warm grunts of pleasure, the cooling of food from pursed lips, or even the romantically inclined sighs with each bite, you feel something powered by the sensual desires that inhabit all beings. It feels short-lived — the bites — after seeing how much time was spent preparing, but the ephemeral nature of what is essentially a delectable climax leans further into the twine that has bound the characters for years.
We see this in the film’s camerawork, but the performances of Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel establish vigor in a manner food cannot achieve. The way they move around each other as they cook, or the way they approach one another in conversation is just as classy as fine dining. There is a clever wit and even romantically engineered foundation for their motivations, and you don’t necessarily hear it, but you feel it in every instance you possibly can. Maybe it’s the way they grip a knife, gently carry produce, waft the fumes that plume from a boiling pot into their nostrils and exhale with satisfactory relief that makes them feel alive. By all accounts, the meals they prepare seem to act as a playground for Eugenie and Dodin to become a unified pairing without the binds of marriage. They work, operate, act and exist as two halves of an entire whole. You feel it in the performances, see it on their faces, and inhale the aroma radiating from every plate.
This is one of those movies that’ll get brought up every few years as one you shouldn’t have missed when you had the chance. I believe it is absolutely mature in how it handles the romantic developments, and remarkably elegant in Hung’s steady pacing that makes each scene feel like a necessary segment of the entire course. He practically strips the dessert away from you, but he lets you linger on the aftertaste left over from the main course. Upon reflection you feel warmth, desire, and emotional enrichment that is at once all about the harmony of reciprocal duties, and also the vitality that is breathed into each ingredient of our life. Passion is a recipe, and no step should be missed, or measurement cut short. If we desire happiness it’ll be catered to us should we keep pursuing the pleasures of what we already have.