In the Flesh: The Taste of Things

Oysters nestled in soft pats of butter, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and topped with little pyramids of glistening black caviar. Ice cream spread with a wooden spoon between rounds of moist, light sponge, then encrusted in a cocoon of French meringue, drizzled in liquor, and limned with barely visible fire. How old were you when you first learned to savor food, to name its component ingredients, to identify flavors and name techniques? You’ll remember during Trần Anh Hùng's The Taste of Things, which is spellbinding, warm, and kept from prudish pastoralist fussiness by its earthy sensuality and abundant, overflowing love for its subject matter. To cook and to eat, in the world of the film, is to be alive, and to celebrate that fact. To rejoice in the bounty taken from the earth and the forests and the seas. What other feeling could one have, watching worn and scarred chef’s hands pull apart a loaf of soft, layered brioche? The melancholy nestled in the heart of Hùng's film is the civet oil that makes the perfume bloom, elevating what might have been simply the world’s most expensive and satisfying ASMR video into a genuine masterpiece.

Eugenie (Juliette Binoche) is the cook, lover, and creative partner of gentleman gourmet Dodin (Benoît Magimel), at whose country estate she is the central and most celebrated fixture. Her cooking commands the loyalty of Dodin’s friends and peers and has, over the course of twenty years, made Dodin the foremost name in the ranks of France’s epicures. His country estate, on which the entire film takes place, might in a lesser movie feel like a romanticization of the moneyed hobbyist’s life of pleasure. Here it is the setting for a slow and gentle human drama  and a showcase for the beauty, both natural and cultivated, of its surroundings. The Taste of Things is concerned solely with emotions and with practical concerns. A lover’s closeness or distance. The temperature of a cast-iron oven. The clarity and color of a broth. There is a tremendous specificity at work here, a faithful recreation of a strange little ecosystem. 

There is a heartbreaking eroticism to the romantic and sexual relationship between Dodin and Eugenie, the chemistry between the two performers surely bolstered by Binoche and Magimel’s past marriage. Watching him watch her bathe is enough to stop your heart, the tenderness and deep desire are so clear. Her refusal to seek treatment for her fainting spells and failing health inspire the same constricting grief, and when she passes Dodin is so overcome by the loss that he’s unable to enter her room. He stands stricken in the doorway as their assistant, Violette (Galatea Bellugi), weeps at Eugenie’s bedside. In the wake of her death, Dodin’s friends good-heartedly hire a cook to make one of her omelets for the melancholic gourmet, who has ceased to eat. Dodin flies into a rage and throws the woman out of his kitchen, but in the wake of this incident, he recovers his appetite and takes on the apprentice Eugenie wanted to train. Food, the film is telling us, is for the living. There’s no nourishment in eating ghosts, and so when love is gone we cannot attempt to feed ourselves on its ashes. We must instead cultivate new love, new vulnerability, new joy, growing these things in the rich soil of what we've lost.