The Current Cinema
A Philosophy of Pleasure in “The Taste of Things”
The film, starring Juliette Binoche as a chef at a country manor, is devoted to the long-ripened skills and sheer hard work that go into the giving of rapture.
By February 5, 2024
In Trần Anh Hùng’s film, Benoît Magimel and Binoche star as a gourmet and his cook.Illustration by Karlotta Freier
The stuff you learn at the cinema. For example, until I saw the latest film from Trần Anh Hùng, “The Taste of Things,” I had no idea that the French for “Baked Alaska” is omelette norvégienne. Weird. Elsewhere, the movie offers an everyday tip: gently work your fingers under the skin of a chicken and insert thin slices of truffle, the better to infuse the tender flesh. Probably a good idea to kill the chicken first.
Most of Trần’s movie is—or appears to be—about food and drink, and it is set in, around, and near a manor house in provincial France. The date, by my calculations, is the mid-eighteen-eighties. There’s a sprightly walk by a river, and a paradisiacal lunch at a long table under the trees, but we never see the bustle of a town or hear the hoot of a train. The house is owned by Dodin (Benoît Magimel), whose vocation is that of a gourmet. He has a loyal cook, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), although, from the start, there is an unusual blurring of social boundaries. The kitchen is Eugénie’s dominion, yet Dodin is often to be found there, helping to prepare the next meal, and at one point he takes over entirely, devising an incomparable dinner for her alone. (This is where the truffle trick comes in.) As she sits and savors it, resplendent in a butter-yellow dress with a high lace collar, one has to ask, Who is at the service of whom?
This being France, one pleasure drips into another. Now and then, Dodin goes to Eugénie’s bedroom door, seeking admittance. There is no sense of droit du seigneur; it’s more as if they have agreed upon a discreet romantic affinity, and the question of why they have never wed, and whether the knot might yet be tied, is openly aired. “Marriage is a dinner that begins with dessert,” Dodin says. The casting helps; Magimel, stocky and solicitous, is the opposite of rakish, and Binoche, as ever, is nobody’s fool, with a laugh as nourishingly earthy as the vegetable that she holds, uprooted from the soil, in the opening moments of the film. (The two actors were formerly a couple in real life, and had a daughter in 1999.) Invited to join Dodin and his friends—all of whom are rightly in awe of her—to consume a sumptuous feast that she has made, Eugénie demurs, preferring to stay in the kitchen. “I converse with you in the dining room through what you eat,” she says.
The creation of that dinner fills the first half hour of the story. If too many cooks on TV, factual or fictional, have led you to expect a steaming jambalaya of shouts, showoffs, panic stations, and free-range oaths, Trần’s film will come as a calm and clear surprise: a consommé devoutly to be wished. The action is purposeful and brisk, but unrushed, as if practice had long ago made perfect. Eugénie says little as she labors, aside from polite requests for the next ingredient (“the loin of veal, please”), and we stare in amazement as a fish the length of an arm is coiled into a copper pan half the size of a bathtub. Not that the monster of the deep will be eaten; it is but a single component of a stock that will then be reduced and strained, the better to invest a silken sauce. And the moral is: you can’t have a molehill without a mountain, and you’ve never tasted molehills like these.
Trần’s concern with food, and with how it can both bind and divide those who consume it, was already evident in his début feature, “The Scent of Green Papaya” (1993). It was set in his native Vietnam, though filmed in France, where he had moved at the age of twelve. Frequent tracking shots lent the movie its tranquil poise, but there were also gleaming closeups of greens a-sizzle in a hot pan, and “The Taste of Things” takes that curiosity to a more complex level, with the camera moving around Eugénie’s kitchen as if under her confident command, and rising over the rim of a pot to inspect—practically to inhale—the fragrance of whatever miracle is unfolding within.
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One person guiding us through “The Scent of Green Papaya” was a young servant girl, and the same is true of the new film. Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire) is on hand to learn the culinary ropes, yet she is, despite the face that she pulls when sampling marrowbone, more than a novice. She is a prodigy. “Mushrooms, fennel, tomatoes, oranges, wine,” she says, listing what she detects in a sip of sauce bourguignonne. “Bay leaf, cumin, juniper berry, clove.” She can’t stop. “Astonishing girl,” Dodin murmurs to Eugénie. Were the French ever to make their own version of “X-Men,” Pauline could appear as a character named Palate or Gustator. If I had to pickle and preserve one frame of Trần’s movie, it would show the expression of infinite wonder with which Pauline greets a mouthful of crayfish vol-au-vent. How about the omelette norvégienne? “I almost cried,” she admits.
For all this rapture, however, “The Taste of Things” is not a foodie film. It doesn’t belong on the shelf beside “Tampopo” (1987), “Babette’s Feast” (1988), or “Chocolat” (2000), an earlier and less digestible Binoche project. I didn’t run out of the cinema and race to the nearest Michelin-starred restaurant, or immediately buy a large rhomboid vessel for poaching turbot, as deployed by Eugénie. I had a glass of wine and a bowl of potato chips. What Trần delivers, in other words, is not always an incitement to drool (look at Dodin, reaching into a bird to drag out the guts), and Dodin and his confrères are amused, rather than impressed, by an overstuffed banquet—“no air, no logic, no line”—that is forced upon them by a visiting nobleman. In return, Dodin dares to propose a simple pot-au-feu.
So what kind of movie is this? A conservative one, I would say, not in politics (a topic that never arises at the table) but in its devotion to long-ripened skills and to the sheer hard work that goes into the giving of pleasure. “One cannot be a gourmet before forty,” Dodin remarks, and his dining pals are neither snobs nor swaggerers but comfortable, solid professional men, including a doctor and a notary, who meet to eat: the very picture of the bourgeoisie. If that turns your stomach, it’s worth pointing out that “The Taste of Things” is crosshatched, in ways that I didn’t foresee and won’t disclose, with shadows of ailing and grief; its closest predecessor, in this respect, is Bertrand Tavernier’s beautiful “Sunday in the Country” (1984). These are films about the grave comedy of being alive, and about submitting to the seasons by which a life is meted out. Mortality is no more of a natural shock than the onset of winter. As the Duke in “Measure for Measure” informs us, “Thou hast nor youth nor age, / But as it were an after-dinner’s sleep, / Dreaming on both.” If you had just enjoyed Eugénie’s roast veal with braised lettuce hearts, plus a bottle of Clos Vougeot, you could die happy and sleep for good.
The new documentary about the composer Ennio Morricone, Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Ennio,” is not new at all. It was screened at festivals as far back as 2021; only now has it earned an American release. This is a welcome prospect, not least because of the revelation that, although the young Ennio’s ambition was to be a doctor, his father demanded that he study the trumpet instead. Listen out for a loud collective crack, as the jaws of a hundred New York parents hit the floor.
The roster of directors who employed—or yielded to—Morricone is laughably distinguished, and headed by Sergio Leone. (As an old photograph shows, they were schoolboys together.) “Ennio” confirms the legend that Morricone’s score was played on set during the shooting of Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), as if to steep the actors in the desired emotional mood. No one is more indebted to Morricone than Tornatore, whose “Cinema Paradiso” (1990) might well have slipped the world’s attention without Morricone’s music. In repaying the debt, so to speak, “Ennio” turns out to be overlong, overblown, and larded with such praises that Morricone, a modest if determined soul, would blush to hear them. The jazz guitarist Pat Metheny describes “Cinema Paradiso” as “one of the profound, iconic, artistic places for me that I reference constantly.” As a rule, distrust those who use the word “iconic,” unless they specialize in the art of the Orthodox Church.
No Morricone score is more delicious, or more devilish, than the one he wrote for Henri Verneuil’s “The Sicilian Clan” (1970), concealing within it a coded tribute to Bach. The film has a mythologically strong cast—Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura, and Alain Delon—and I revere it so much that I even have a Hungarian poster for it, with a grainy Delon wearing shades and gripping a gun. But here’s the catch: not once have I actually watched “The Sicilian Clan.” I’m told that it’s O.K. but not great, so why devastate the ideal by embracing the merely real? Instead, I intend to keep the film forever out of reach, tormenting myself with Morricone’s music, which glides around in circles and fades away as if reluctant to end. For those of us who still retreat to the cinema’s womb, our most joyful agony is not to encounter movies that are foolish or horrible or broken-backed. It is to imagine, eyes wide shut, all the movies that we shall never see. ♦
Published in the print edition of the February 12 & 19, 2024, issue, with the headline “Realms of the Senses.”
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Anthony Lane is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.”
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