Part of Swoon: A Love Series
Destined to be remembered as one of the great films about the meaning, texture and experience of food, this sumptuous, exceptionally well-crafted work, set in late 19th-century France, stars Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel (married, decades ago, in real life) as Eugénie, a cook, and Dodin, the gourmand she has been working with for 20 years. As they reach middle age, they can no longer deny their mutual romantic feelings, which have so long been concentrated in their passionate professionalism. This simple narrative — based upon Marcel Rouff’s 1924 novel La passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet — sets the table for a sublime, sense-heightening exploration of pleasure, in which the play of sunlight across a late-afternoon kitchen is as meaningful as the image of a perfectly poached pear or the crisp of a buoyant vol-au-vent. Director Trân Anh Hùng (THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA) won the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his bravura, scrupulously deployed feat of epicurean cinema. (Synopsis from the New York Film Festival)
“A film in which food is the language of love, and love in turn is a silent conversation between middle-aged professionals who are experts at their craft. THE TASTE OF THINGS comes wrapped in some of the most gorgeous and thoughtful filmmaking this side of BABETTE’S FEAST — a fellow contender for the greatest food movie ever made — with fine-tuned, lived-in performances that intrigue as much as they endear.” —Siddant Adlakha, Mashable “It’s an old psychology cliché that people use food as a way of either sublimating or substituting for love. In THE TASTE OF THINGS, there’s no separation. The love of food and romance are viewed as all one singular desire for everything beautiful and fleeting in life.” —Chris Barsanti, Slant Magazine “The most hypnotic sequences are virtually dialogue-free and work like ASMR as spoons tinkle, brass pots steam, wine glugs, crockery clanks and all the while Magimel and Binoche exude a meditative commitment to the practical tasks that they are performing.” —Sophie Monks Kaufman, IndieWire
