The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
‘The Taste of Things’ serves up a mouthwatering feast
NEW YORK >> Think of food and movies and your mind could quickly whip up a five-course meal. Maybe a few hard-boiled eggs, to start, from “Cool Hand Luke.” A side order of toast from “Five Easy Pieces,” followed by the soup from “Ratatouille.” A main course of octopus from “Oldboy.” And let’s wash all that down with a $5 shake from “Pulp Fiction.”
Since before Charlie Chaplin made bread rolls dance in “The Gold Rush,” cinema and cuisine have been as intertwined as the spaghetti of “The Lady and the Tramp.” But a real food movie — one that doesn’t just stop for noodles (“In the Mood for Love”) or take a trip to Katz’s (“When Harry Met Sally…”) — is a rarer delicacy.
Those movies that fully invest themselves in the making and consuming food are more all-youreyes-can-eat buffets. Films like “Tampopo,” that wildly erotic ode to ramen; “Babette’s Feast,” with its sumptuous banquet; and “Eat Drink Man Woman,” Ang Lee’s nourishing family meal.
It’s a rich and savory tradition that gets a delicious new serving in Tr n Anh Hùng’s “The Taste of Things.” If ever a film was a feast, it’s
Hùng’s. The movie, starring Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel, opens with a glorious 40-minute scene set in a late 19th century French country kitchen where a meal is being prepared.
Butter is sizzling. Loins of veal are roasting. Fresh crawfish are peeled. A fish is gutted. Soup bubbles. Few words are said but the kitchen hums. Utensils clank. Meringue burns. Steam rises.
There’s no music but it’s a symphony. Eugénie (Binoche), the righthand woman of top chef Dodin Bouffant (Magimel), works with quiet, assured mastery. It’s as riveting as any action-movie set piece.
“I told my crew: This is my carchase scene,” says Hùng.
Hùng, the 61-year-old French-Vietnamese filmmaker, traces his love of cinema to his father, who would come home in South Vietnam with detailed descriptions of movies he had seen at the cinema, riveting Hùng. But his mother’s kitchen, he says, “gave me my first feeling of beauty.”
“The Taste of Things,” which opens in select theaters Friday, isn’t just about cooking. Like most movies about food, its appreciation of cuisine has as much to do with love and art as recipes and ingredients. Loosely inspired by Marcel Rouff’s classic 1924 novel “The Passionate Epicure,” “The Taste of Things” unfolds as a later-in-life love story, one with added poignance since Binoche and Magimel were, themselves, a couple 20 years earlier.
To Hùng, who recently spoke by phone during a trip to Vietnam (he lives in Paris), says his mouthwatering opening scene, in all its sensory pleasures, is a paean to cinema.
“In musicals, it’s about harmony and the expression of love and pleasure,” says Hùng. “All of this was inside of me and I wanted to express it in this first scene in the kitchen where people move a lot. The level of gesture is enormous. How they move combined with complex camera movement, that came from musicals for me.”
France selected “The Taste of Things” as the country’s Oscar submission over the much-celebrated “Anatomy of a Fall.” At last year’s Cannes Film Festival, it won best director for Hùng.*