Tran Anh Hung’s exquisite multicultural period piece
In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Spencer Tracy played the stalwart liberal newspaper editor forced by everyone around him to declare a position on his daughter’s upcoming interracial marriage. But Tracy took only one challenge seriously: when his potential mother-in-law, Beah Richards, alleged “You forgot what passion is!” That charge applies to the current state of film culture that dismisses Tran Anh Hung’s existential romance The Taste of Things (La passion de Dodin Bouffant).
Overlooked by obtuse awards groups, The Taste of Things (France’s official submission to the Academy Awards) displays the importance of sensibility through the example of a 19th-century French chef Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) and his lover-assistant Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). Based on the famous chef Brillat-Savarin — who in 1825 wrote Physiologie de goût, ou méditations de gastronomie transcendante (The Physiology of Taste: Or, Transcendental Gastronomy) — Hung’s film explores artistic aspirations as well as spiritual and erotic connection. The film shows deep feeling — the emotions and intelligence that go beyond sensory response.
Dull-witted reviewers describe The Taste of Things as a movie about food (including everything from Babette’s Feast and Tampopo to the comical Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle). But this banal approach is blind to Hung’s extraordinary subtext: Dodin, known as “the Napoleon of the culinary arts,” and the equally gifted, inspiring Eugénie both respect skill, cooperation, and generosity. How they prepare and cook their dishes creates a spectacle of movement and grace, a prelude to their discreet intimacy. (“May I knock at your door tonight?”) Had the film promoted climate politics, it surely would have been more heralded. Instead, it’s a splendid depiction of what it means to be civilized.
Hung’s private artists work in a culture of conspicuous consumption, challenging their judgmental diners who follow high, strict standards of excellence. It’s both amusing and instructive to observe the gathered gastronomes’ persnickety refinement and surprise (at one point wearing napkins over their heads to intensify a meal’s aroma). It’s also a reproof to modern insensitivity (such as Oppenheimer and Barbie fans watching those inelegant movies with their heads in the ground).
The concept of “passion” is foreign for today’s pop culture, but it is perpetuated through the filmmaking passion that distinguishes Hung’s own work The Scent of Green Papaya, Cyclo, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, and the problematic Norwegian Wood — films in which Vietnamese-born Hung always connects Asian culture to European art. His color sense and visual rhythm recall Bertolucci’s cinematic poetry. Here, Hung’s multicultural sensitivity triumphs over the current “looks-like-me” ethnic and cultural segregation. The Taste of Things is unapologetically European, but middling reviews can’t negate the film’s exquisite connection of Dodin and Eugénie’s expertise to everyone’s innate desire to love and create. Honoring their legendary predecessors — the vaunted Antonin Carême (master chef in the early 19th century) and Auguste Escoffier — Dodin and Eugénie find a protégé in young Pauline (Bonni Chagneau-Ravoire), an “extraordinary girl born with perfect [gustatorial] pitch,” to carry on their legacy. (“We dream of the future.”)
Hung emphasizes process and ritual (even a funeral) as stages of life, unlike the pessimistic, death-loving gloom of David Fincher’s “procedural” movies. As archetypes of French expertise, Magimel and Binoche, with the tiniest of gestures, give their characters epic dimensions —Eugénie handling kitchenware, Dodin weightily walking the corridors of their home, both taking measured breaths. Relaxing during evening light, before a green-blue lake and tree branches, the couple share a moment of peace while Hung’s camera swings like a pendulum — perhaps the year’s single most beautiful scene.
Respecting everyday experience, Hung shows Eugénie supervising a farm where a copper pole with a zinc antenna awakens the soil, or appreciating the American concoction “baked Alaska” as “a scientific dessert.” Hung defends aesthetic passion when Dodin himself is challenged by the army of chefs working for the crown prince of Eurasia — he proudly critiques their dishes for having “no air, no logic, no line.” That’s also how we must critique today’s pop culture.
The Taste of Things encapsulates our neglected artistic, moral heritage (Eugénie cooks ortolans, the instructional dish from Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi). Hung’s defense of artistic passion starts with the human touch, then illumines our basic needs and spiritual appetite. This lesson on lost passion quotes Saint Augustine: “Happiness is continuing to desire what we already have.”