Original Title: La passion de Godin Bouffant
Year: 2023
Country: France
Language: French
Genre: Drama, Romance
Director/Screenwriter: Tran Anh Hung
Based on the novel by Marcel Rouff
Cinematography: Jonathan Ricquebourg
Editor: Mario Battistel
Cast:
Benoît Magimel
Juliette Binoche
Galatéa Bellugi
Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire
Patrick d’Assumçao
Emmanuel Salinger
Jan Hammenecker
Frédéric Fisbach
Jean-Marc Roulot
Yannik Landrein
Sarah Adler
Mhamed Arezki
Pierre Gagnaire
Clément Hervieu-Léger
Chloé Lambert
Rating: 7.6/10
French-Vietnamese filmmaker Tran Anh Hung’s seventh feature THE TASTE OF THINGS is a blowout for haute cuisine suckers. It is at your own peril spectating it with an empty stomach. The year is 1889, Dodin Bouffant (Magimel) is a gourmet and an estate owner, his symbiosis with Eugenie (Binoche), his cook for over 20 years, is among the most harmonious ones between a single man and a single woman in their mature years. They are soulmates and friends with benefits, attracted by deep tendresse, sustained by their mutual respect and passion for food. Only the catch is that lately Eugenie is often smitten with abrupt faint spells, whose cause even Dodin’s renowned doctor friend Rabaz (Salinger) cannot put his finger on.
After cooking nourishing meals for the ailing Eugenie, Dodin finally conquers her heart with a marriage proposal. How splendid to discover the engagement ring in the dessert? For a while, Eugenie seems to revivify by the prospect of entering the holy matrimony in their autumn days, but eventually Dodin is blindsided by the bereavement shy of their wedding (they even do not have time to complete Dodin’s famous “pot-au-feu” aiming to bowl over a visiting prince, whose grandiose 8-hour meal proves to be quite a health hazard). Inured to the absence of Eugenie, Dodin is hot and bothered, only the presence of Pauline (a quite, luminous Chagneau-Ravoire), a teenage girl shows great potentiality in gastronomy, can bring him some sense of equilibrium. Still, life goes on and there will be a new cook, even a promising one for Dodin. In the film’s final moment, encircled by a 360-degree gyrating camera and implemented by the sleight of hand in the editing room, a magical shot materializes where Dodin and Eugenie are confabulating, perhaps for the very last time. Choosing between “cook” or “wife”, Dodin gives his answer that puts a radiant smile on Eugenie’s face. A telling conviction of Tran’s belief in a woman’s true worth.
The film opens with a lavish dinner the duo prepares for their guests. Suffused with the natural vibrancy of the raw ingredients, and the delicacy of handling them with culinary dexterity and precision (though the olfactory and gustatory sensoria are the blindspots which the art of motion picture cannot satisfy). The sumptuous sequences lure audience to be the witness of the creation process as if great art pieces are being processed. In a way, gastronomy is in fact, a form of art. Its finely created artworks can satiate both one’s mental and physical lassitude, and they become even more precise owing to their perishability. Once consumed, they are subsumed to be a part of one’s body, vanishingly, preserved in somewhere until mortality catches up.
Reuniting ex-partners Magimel and Binoche (who were an item from 1998-2003), THE TASTE OF THINGS really brings about the most tangible fondness between them. Binoche is an unremitting fount of composure and affability, informing Eugenie’s infirmity with almost imperceptible nuances. Although a decade younger than Binoche, Magimel has already lost his handsomeness as his physique goes phocine and his heavy breathing is prominently audible in close-ups, which effectively counterpoints Binoche’s more delicate, fragile posture and erases their age gap.
While haute cuisine is too dainty a subject for the common people to relate to, and Tran feels no consideration to tone down the story’s intrinsic class-and-gender discrepancy, THE TASTE OF THINGS is nonetheless, a peculiar jewel that firmly nails its color to the mast of national pride and leaves audience maddeningly envious of the ambrosia on display, something apparently, is worth dying for.
referential entries: Tran Anh Hung’s THE VERTICAL RAY OF THE SUN (2000, 7.3/10); Xavier Giannoli’s LOST ILLUSIONS (2021, 7.5/10).
Cinema Omnivore 