Filmic Feasts are an irresistible category. They feed us with visuals and satiate us with emotion. We hoped for Babette’s Feast (1987), fretted over Like Water for Chocolate (1992), and delighted in Tampopo (1985). We also have personal picks like This Is Not What I Expected (2017) with its quirky yet whimsical romance. What unites them is the laden table these films lay out before us. They expand the meaning of: We eat first with our eyes. And they cause us to “eat our hearts out”—we can taste the cuisine as surely as we feel the characters’ triumphs and their falls.
Written and directed by Trân Anh Hùng (from the novel La Vie et la Passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet), The Taste of Things centers on chef Doudin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) and his partnership with his cook, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). The pair live and work in the countryside of 19th-century France, where they are famous for their culinary symphonies.
Yet, as harmonious as they are in the kitchen, Doudin and Eugénie have left too much unsaid. Their passions are intensified by their dishes but also duplicated in them. In this way, Hùng turns their cooking into love letters, passed back and forth in the silence of the unspoken. Food is the couple’s love language, and The Taste of Things is an epicurean epistle.
The framing and palettes are lavish—chocolatey, golden, and green. The lighting is as soothing as sunbeams and hearths. And, more than Magimel’s Doudin, the camera becomes Binoche’s lover. Her Eugénie is the centerpiece. We begin to want what she longs for. Our hearts flutter when she gently alludes to her desires. The Taste of Things is a delicious filmic-feast; lingering on the palate with bittersweetness.
