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| Director Trân Anh Hùng |
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| Trân with Dennis Lim at Film at Lincoln Center |
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| Trân with Benoît Magimel |
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| Trân with Juliette Binoche |
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| culinary consultant Pierre Gagnaire |
THE TASTE OF THINGS (La passion de Dodin Bouffant) B aka: The Pot-au-Feu France Belgium (135 mi) 2023 d: Trân Anh Hùng
The discovery of a new dish brings more joy to humanity than the discovery of a new star. — Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel)
Winner of the Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival 2023, this deceptively simple film has little actual drama, chosen to represent France at the Oscars for Best International Film, passing over Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winning Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d'une chute) (2023). From the maker of THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA (1993), VERTICAL RAY OF THE SUN (2000), and Norwegian Wood (2010), Trân is a Vietnamese-born French filmmaker proficient in Vietnamese, French, and English languages, admittedly influenced by Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Mizoguchi. His transcendent yet often ambiguous films are languid sensual experiences, offering a feeling as if the camera is floating on air, providing opulent textures in every frame, often providing a myriad of simultaneous events with multiple character relationships, showing a uniform theme of strong Asian cultural values, including family respect, bonding, and commitment. Recalling works like Gabriel Axel’s BABETTE’S FEAST (1987) and Ang Lee’s EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN (1994), this is an impassioned ode to gastronomy mixed with philosophical overtones set in France during the Belle Époque era of the 1880’s, where the gluttonous indulgence on display is utterly flabbergasting, where less than .01% of the world’s population since the dawn of time has ever eaten like this, something more commonly associated with the hedonistic indulgence of Nero before the fall of Rome, a stark contrast from the naturally healthy cuisine in Vietnam, with minimal use of fats or oils, where the rich butter-saturated excess is certainly not healthy and is what we commonly think leads to heart disease. The one-note aspect of non-stop cooking in the kitchen and then taking such extreme pleasure in the taste afterwards is so exaggerated to the extreme that at times it can feel absurdly laughable, but that is not the director’s intentions, as this is a masterclass on the culinary art of taste and bourgeois refinement, where it’s basically an elaborately staged two-person play revolving exclusively around food, with the intermingling of two like-minded, creative souls, establishing a slow rhythm in the opening half hour, utilizing an immersive, near wordless restraint that follows the main protagonists as they skillfully move around the kitchen without all that cooking gadgetry used today, seen hovering over the stove, adding ingredients, tasting, issuing precise instructions, with the director creating a culinary ballet in motion. The carefully chosen sound design includes birds, insects, and farm animals that are heard through open windows, but never seen, with no accompanying music, only a few bars of Bellini’s Casta Diva at the opening while a Jules Massenet theme closes the film leading into the final credits. The authenticity of the subject matter required a Michelin-winning chef, Pierre Gagnaire, as a culinary consultant, along with his chef Michel Nave preparing all the food used on the set, and actually appears in one scene rattling off the meticulously detailed twenty course menu for a wealthy Eurasian Prince that is so grandiose that it required 8-hours to consume. Adapted from the early 20th century gastromic novel La vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet (The Life and Passion of Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet) by Swiss writer Marcel Rouff, one of the founding members of the Académie des gastronomes in 1928, which unfolds in the 1830’s referencing Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a pioneering writer of gastronomic studies and French lawyer who briefly fled to the U.S. to survive the aftermath the French Revolution, where the enduring popularity of the book is clear, as it went through 50 French editions between 1924 and 2010, where Rouff was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor (Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur), France’s highest civilian honor. But French cuisine was largely established by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, known simply as Talleyrand, who became a leading member of the revolution, and Napoleon’s chief diplomat, where his meals were created by pâtissier Marie-Antoine Carême (Marie Antoine Careme - The First Celebrity Chef), the leading French chef of the early 19th century, who created the best cuisine possible for the influx of ambassadors from around the world.
Most of the film takes place in the idyllic setting of a spacious 19th century chateau home kitchen that belongs to world-class gastronome and wealthy restaurateur Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), shot at the Château du Raguin (château du Raguin - Chateau fort et Manoir) in the Maine-et-Loire region of western France, with its stone walls, wood burning stove ovens, copper pots, extensive vegetable and herb gardens, and fields of livestock, overseen by Eugénie (Juliette Binoche, initially rejecting the role until it was expanded from a script rewritten with her in mind), an accomplished gourmet cook who’s able to bring his ambitious menus to life. Much of what we see, and more importantly the way we see it, is through her eyes. She is the behind-the-scenes force that orchestrates everything that transpires, seen waltzing around the stoves with stunning confidence and finesse, with so many things happening simultaneously. And that’s pretty much it, and while Magimel and Binoche are exquisite throughout (in real life they have a child together, Hana, who reportedly cried at seeing this film bringing her parents back together), watching people cook for over two hours may not appeal to any but the most passionate food lovers, but what stands out isn’t so much what is being filmed, but the way that it is presented. Like Trân’s other films, the utterly luxurious, choreographed elegance of Jonathan Ricquebourg’s luminous cinematography is the defining quality of the film, mostly shot on 35mm, and is nothing less than spectacular, along the lines of Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON (1975) or Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) (1998), taking full advantage of natural light and the bucolic countryside, mostly shot with roving handheld cameras that move with immaculate precision around the room, soaking in the meticulous preparation of food with loving adoration, with a candlelight dinner shot at the Château de Brissac, while another was shot alongside a shimmering moonlit lake. The sensual bliss of how food is presented mirrors the romanticized relationship happening onscreen, both in body and spirit, as Eugénie has worked for Dodin for the last 20 years, known as “the Napoleon of culinary art,” and by turning the preparation of food into a kind of religious experience, it becomes their means of communicating, where cooking together is their prayerful dialogue, proof of how their relationship has evolved. By now they’re able to complete each other’s thoughts in the kitchen, as their intimate working relationship with food is matched by his complete devotion to her, as he is in awe of what she can produce in the kitchen. They also have a long-standing sexual attraction, living in separate quarters in the chateau where she is happy with the way things are, enjoying the teasing aspect of having the luxury of leaving her door opened or locked at night, which gives her the kind of freedom and control she thrives upon, a practice he has grown to accept. Otherwise, this is a man’s world, as Dodin’s guests are exclusively male, a chauvinistic Greek chorus collection of some of the town’s most successful men, pillars of the community so to speak, always dressed in black, who share a common epicurean passion for the sheer delights of eating gourmet food, where the devotion these men express at the table, accompanied by only the finest French wines, exceeds the attention any of them ever show to the women in their lives, who are never seen, of course, as they prioritize food over anything else. Accordingly, Eugénie, who never appears in the dining room, preferring to eat in the kitchen with the servants, has come to represent a kind of demigod in their eyes. In this film, the sensual pleasure of food becomes linked to erotic passion, reminiscent of the culinary history of Afro-Brazilian Bahia culture on display in Hector Babenco’s sex farce Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands (Doña Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) (1976). The film is dedicated to Trân’s wife, Trân Nu Yên-Khê, who not only starred in his first three films but also worked as an art director and costume designer for this film.
As sublimely gorgeous as this film is to look at, given an impressionistic style of classical painting, this is as much about obsession as anything else, where there’s an indulgence factor that is disturbing, as this may be one of the unhealthiest films ever to grace the screen (vegetarians beware), setting a terrible example, and to simply overlook that is at one’s own peril. Dodin confesses “it takes culture and a good memory to shape one’s taste,” yet one wonders why this extreme degree of cultural fascination is so representative of French culture, as so few can ever experience food on this level, or would ever want to, as it’s not much different than extreme sports, like skiing off a mountain, swimming the English Channel, or mountain climbing without ropes, where it’s all about the untainted purity of the experience. Working alongside Eugénie in the kitchen are two dedicated young assistants, the ever faithful maid/sous chef Violette (Galatéa Bellugi) and her child prodigy young niece, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), turning the room into a quiet and reflective sanctuary, pausing to season and taste along the way, with Dodin himself making regular appearances to surgically cut and prepare various fish, meats, and vegetables, all freshly acquired, combining exact proportions of spices, where the art of cooking is not for the faint of heart, but the result of meticulous measurements of exact science that produce such rare results, like a pot-au-feu, vol-au-vent, and an omelette norvégienne (baked Alaska), as these guests have such carefully trained palettes that anything less than extraordinary would immediately be recognized as lacking heart and soul. It is a world of riches and earthly delights, the historical interest of kings and queens, as only they had the leisure time and unlimited finances for living such a lavish lifestyle to truly appreciate such delicacies that take all day to prepare, celebrating Puligny Montrachet and Chambolle Musigny as the most sublime white and red burgundies on earth, where Marie Antoinette, the last queen prior to the French Revolution, grew extremely unpopular with the public and was guillotined for living in such decadence. The royal family would be delighted that such exaggerated culinary interest would suddenly recapture the interest of the nation some two hundred years later, as if exonerated from their crimes. Despite years of playing coy, Eugénie finally agrees to Dodin’s marriage proposal, apparently won over by an elaborate meal he prepares especially for her, not allowing her to set foot in the kitchen, then watching her consume every morsel with great anticipation, including champagne pulled from a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean, literally sweeping her off her feet, where the individualism of their separate worlds are suddenly combined, with the marital celebration capturing the picturesque beauty of a Renoir painting, where friends are gathered around a long table situated alongside a lake for lunch, with the couple seen afterwards walking through a sun-kissed meadow. But after a series of unexplained fainting spells, she mysteriously disappears from view, leaving a void not only in his life but the audience as well, suggesting there is, like a meal one consumes, an ephemeral nature to all of this, as the intensity quickly dissipates with Binoche out of the kitchen, creating an uneven aftermath that simply lags, unable to capture the same fascination without her, as she is the engine that drives the picture. While she is as essential as Sonia Braga is to DOÑA FLOR, this film leaves plenty of unanswered questions and is likely to appeal only to the most ardent culinary followers or those devoted arthouse cinephiles who will be mesmerized by the hypnotic beauty in every frame, concluding with that lyrical Massenet piano theme, Méditation from the opera Thaïs, Meditation from Thaïs for piano (Andrew von Oeyen) filmed in ... YouTube (5:18).
