The current menu for film and TV stories about cuisine is all conflict and crisis – kitchens as battlefields, dishes forged in the white-hot skillet of raging tempers. But new French film The Taste of Things couldn’t be further from The Bear or Boiling Point. A controlled simmer is more the temperature of this piece by Vietnamese-born director Tran Anh Hung – the most rapturous hymn to culinary art since such beloved gourmet outings as Babette’s Feast or Eat Drink Man Woman.
Set in the 1880s, the film – which won Tran the best director award at Cannes last year – is about the relationship between cook Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) and her gourmet employer and lover Dodin (Benoît Magimel). But the film is ultimately about creativity, says Tran. “I wanted to make a movie about art and I chose food, because this art is very concrete. For me, cinema is something that needs to be very sensual, very physical.”
