Tran Anh Hung has only made five films in the years between his breakthrough and The Taste of Things (La Passion de Dodin Bouffant). Not much has changed since 1993’s The Scent of Green Papaya. This is also a languid and beautiful film full of longing for a bygone time when people did things properly and (say this very quietly) they also knew their place.
It doesn’t need a plot. You could watch this exquisite movie for the images alone, which are spectacular and gorgeous, like paintings by Renoir or Manet come to life. But there is one, several in fact, providing just enough thread to lead us from one elegant instance of high-level gourmandising to another.
One concerns the relationship between the master of the house and his cook. He, Dodin Bouffant, is a 19th-century gourmand of exquisite taste; she, Eugénie, is a cook of olympian skill. Though he’s the master and she the servant they are equals when it comes to food and possibly soul mates in other matters.
Often they work together side by side in the kitchen, doing the groundwork for the meals he will host for his friends, fellow gourmands. He would like to marry her. She has refused him every time he has asked, preferring the liberty of the skilled single woman to the subordination of the wife.
Another concerns the new girl in the kitchen, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), young but clearly talented and with a palate that marks her out as a possible apprentice to Eugénie.
A third concerns a little rivalry between the master of the house and a visiting prince, who, having heard of the dinners served up by Bouffant at his grand chateau, has attempted to outdo him with a feast of preposterous fussiness – and missed the point entirely.
Now gourmand Dodin Bouffant has to return the favour by inviting the prince to his place, where, by way of putting the man in his culinary place, he intends to serve him a simple pot-au-feu – a casserole – albeit one cooked to within a whisker of perfection.
Only the first of these plots has any real traction – Dodin and Eugénie. The one concerning Pauline is picked up and put down, like someone playing with their food. The one involving the prince may have been the initial focus of the film (Pot Au Feu was meant to be the original title) but it is abandoned entirely and by the second half of the film Tran has in effect asked us to forget it was ever mentioned.
We’re in the world where the spirit of Antonin Carême presides over French gastronomy and Auguste Escoffier is currently building the reputation that will eventually come to threaten Carême’s. With both you get rich but elegant food. Creamy sauces. Wine pairings discussed at length. Food as a philosophy and a sensory experience. People who follow Carême and Escoffier live to eat, because eating to live is what animals do.
The character of Dodin is clearly a version of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of the classic foodie memoir Physiologie du Goût. Benoît Magimel plays him with the peacocking played down and the philosophising played up, as a tender, thoughtful man’s man rather than a bewigged fop. Against him is Juliette Binoche as Eugénie, dedicated, gifted, charming, attractive. Magimel and Binoche were once married in real life, which adds a certain spice to their roles.
All that said, none of the people, none of the plots in Tran’s movie matter quite as much as the imagery, which is food-porn adjacent. Vast pots of simmering stocks. Chickens stuffed with truffles. A huge turbot cooked in milk, herbs and lemon. Crayfish. A rack of lamb. A puff pastry tower stuffed with vegetables in a creamy sauce. A baked Alaska, quite the thing in the days before the refrigerator – and who knew it was called a Norwegian Omelette in French?
At the end Tran does a repeated spin through the kitchen where so much of the action has been set – “behold this golden realm”, it says. On a more mundane level it also says, “Where am I hiding the lights?” And well might you ask. Technically this is off the chart, and if cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg had a showreel before, he’ll have junked most of it for any number of sun-soaked images from this film, a feast for the eyes which Tran keeps just out of the realm of the cruise-ship brochure by not being too polite and by making the film’s pivot a rare and sudden moment of metaphorical rain falling on this dappled world.
If you love food you’ll love this film. If you’re not that bothered either way, Tran’s movie is a powerful and mouth-watering exhortation to forsake the nuggets and broaden your experience.
You’ve got to have money, of course, to live a life like this and Tran doesn’t seem too bothered about Dodin Bouffant’s epicurean ecstasies happening in a society where people are grinding out an existence. On the other hand Bouffant’s name is Bouffant which isn’t entirely value-free (it’s acquired from Marcel Rouff’s original novel, though Tran could have changed it).
And there’s a little scene where Bouffant and his cronies eat ortalans, the songbird literally drowned alive in armagnac, then casseroled before being eaten whole, guts and all, from underneath a white cloth. Barbaric? Possibly (it’s said that the mortally ill French president François Mitterand dined on ortalan eight days before he died and no food ever passed his lips again).
On that subject, make sure you’ve eaten before watching, or have a little something on standby. Perhaps a couple of quail stuffed with foie gras?
The Taste of Things – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
