The Taste of Things begins with Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) in an estate garden, collecting vegetables. I immediately noticed the sound of her clogs clapping against the boards laid between the garden rows. That sound, it turns out, is a mission statement. This is a profoundly sensual film, one that forces the audience to delight in all the senses a movie can rally to its purpose.
The first 15 or 20 minutes revolve around the preparation of a lavish meal. There is little dialogue, and no real sense of who we’re watching. I was unsure if Eugénie and Dodin (Benoît Magimel) were servants, or a husband and wife working their own stove, or both. Director Trần Anh Hùng nurses that ambiguity. For these people, the preparation of food is the greatest creative act, the greatest act of love, possible. Their passion fills the screen.
I assume the opening sequence lasts about 15 or 20 minutes. I honestly couldn’t tell you. I was transfixed. It may have been 10 minutes, and it may have been half an hour. I could have watched these four people—house servant Violette and her niece Pauline assist—cook that meal for the duration of the movie. It’s a perfect example of the magic of cinema, of something no other medium can do. I was in a shit mood as I walked into the theater, but the aesthetic spell cast from the jump is so complete that I was instantly carried away.
Hùng’s camera lingers on every detail. Every time a plate is scraped into a pot or mushrooms are chucked in a pan, I found myself overwhelmed. If the camera took a moment to peer into a pot, which it nearly always did, I cheered. “I should spend more time preparing my own food,” he thought to himself only two hours before buying a cubano and some oversized cookies in the foodcourt.
The Taste of Things is more accurately represented by its French title, La Passion de Dodin Bouffant. We learn that the elaborate meal they’re preparing, a multi-course monstrosity spearheaded by Eugénie, is a dinner for Dodin and his gourmet friends. They are a kind-hearted group of enthusiasts, men who talk of food while dining, who discuss the history behind dishes and the latest gossip involving the employment of the great chefs. One of my favorite running jokes of the film is that the four friends seem an inseparable collective, nearly always around. There’s something of magical realism about them.
Food, then, is Dodin’s passion. After the meal, his friends pass through the kitchen, complimenting Eugénie for her efforts and asking why she no longer dines with them. “For it to be done right, I must be here in the kitchen,” she demures. At that point, I assumed they were married. The warmth pours out of both of them, helped I’m sure by the fact that Binoche and Magimel were together in real life for about a decade. It’s only later that night, when Dodin and Eugénie are sat outside by the lake for tea, recovering from the exhaustion of the day’s efforts, that we receive clarity. “I’ll ask again,” he says as he puffs his pipe. “Will you marry me?”
That’s more or less the temperament of The Taste of Things, content to reveal without ever focusing. Not only are Eugénie and Dodin not married, they aren’t even “technically” a couple. They are certainly in love. Through food and over time they have discovered the shared language that is at the center of any great relationship.
Dodin proposes to Eugénie again later in the film, during a marvelous scene in which he cooks a multi-course meal for her. He proposes with a dish, and it is in keeping with the movie’s overall sensibilities that this is the one dish we never get a glamour shot of. The Taste of Things avoids the moments of highest drama as much as it can. It’s fitting that we never see the only dish in the story with an agenda beyond the joys of feeding and eating. It occurs to me, that too is a good description of love.
During that opening sequence, Eugénie briefly reveals that she is hiding an illness. We assume she will die later, and indeed she does. When she dies, she takes Dodin’s joy for (not of) cooking away. He loses all interest in food. “You haven’t eaten in two days,” Violette admonishes. That’s a bad sign no matter who you are, but for Dodin, that’s cataclysmic. This is a man who came home from an eight-hour meal to request some simple dishes from Eugénie before going to bed. “He didn’t want to sleep on the memory of that meal,” she says with a smile.
A few hours after getting home, my mind is marinating in the images and sounds of The Taste of Things. It makes the argument that life is what we experience, for however long we manage to do that; it should all be taken in to the fullest extent possible. I’m also thinking about Eugénie and Dodin, about their love for one another, about the language they share between themselves, and about Dodin’s loss.
“I have a very important question for you,” Eugénie says.
“Yes.”
“Am I your cook, or your wife?”
Dodin takes a moment before taking her hand. “My cook, of course.”
Eugénie smiles. “Thank you.”
Taylor Swift got it right when she wrote, “You showed me colors you know I can’t see with anyone else.”