Part of my coverage of the 59th Chicago International Film Festival.
THE TASTE OF THINGS ***
Tran Anh Hung2023
IDEA: After 20 years together, a gourmet and his devoted cook in late-19th-century France decide to take their relationship to the next level.
BLURB: During the first feast scene in The Taste of Things, an affluent diner remarks that humans are the only creatures that “drink without thirst.” Food as epicurean indulgence is at the heart of Tran Anh Hung’s film, a stately and sensuous reflection on the meaning people invest in cooking and eating. Nary a moment passes in which a character isn’t handling food or drink in some way, and when they aren’t, their dialogue is likely to concern lavish menu preparations or detailed explanations of the human chewing and swallowing mechanism. Tran is less interested in plot than in luxuriating in the gustatory and aesthetic pleasures of the gourmet customs he depicts. His two-hour-plus film takes its time as it wallows in magic hour-lit kitchens and candelabra-festooned dining rooms, the camera and sound design reverently attuned to sizzling pans, chopped vegetables, and perfectly marinated veal, turbot, and cockerel. The director bestows upon gastronomy the same care and patience as Benoît Magimel’s Dodin, for whom food is a sacred love language. Magimel and Juliette Binoche are wonderful together, conveying a palpable sense of how their culinary appetites are inseparable from their romance; both are predicated on sensual delight and satiety, things as inconstant as life itself. Perhaps Tran could have dug deeper beyond the surface of his milieu, drawing out layers to ruffle his bourgeois idyll, but then The Taste of Things might have turned bitter, and you can’t have that in a vol-au-vent.
