The Taste of Things movie review (2023) – Roger Ebert

The opening scene of Tran Anh Hung’s “The Style of Issues” is 38 minutes lengthy. It exhibits two individuals, and their two younger assistants, getting ready a meal in an enormous nation kitchen. The meal is intricate, and a number of programs are being ready concurrently. The digicam glides via the kitchen, following the characters as they create a handful of greens to an already sizzling pan on the range, circling again to the chopping on a close-by desk. The digicam by no means stops transferring. What we’re doing, for 38 minutes, is watching these individuals prepare dinner, and, naturally, drooling over the meal being ready earlier than our eyes. This scene is an incredible feat, a lot so that there is satisfaction if you watch the company within the eating room style the meals, savoring each chunk, not even needing to say a phrase. The pleasure is palpable. 

Via this scene, the place no one says something past “Put the veal within the oven”, we piece collectively the relationships. It is so gratifying to get to know characters by watching what they do (versus take heed to them speak about themselves). An incredible quantity of data is conveyed with out dialogue. There’s Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), overseeing the meal, and in addition cooking himself, splitting time by visiting along with his company. His companion within the kitchen is Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), who tends to her work with apparent pleasure, her face lit up, happy on the success of an extended day’s toil. She’s not only a good prepare dinner. She’s an artist. The 2 assistants are teenage women, Violette (Galatéa Bellugi) and Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), who work silently and obediently. Pauline is new to the kitchen, and nonetheless a baby, however she is a gastronomic prodigy, in a position to title all of a broth’s substances merely from the style. Dodin and Eugénie acknowledge and domesticate her reward. 

Based mostly on the favored French novel The Passionate Epicure (1920), written by Marcel Rouff, “The Style of Issues” options many such scenes, prolonged delectable cooking scenes, however it’s the first which establishes the movie’s rhythm. One would not even discover the size of the scene, as a result of what is occurring is so soothing and pleasurable. The historical past of “meals films” is an extended one, however there’s by no means been meals as scrumptious wanting because the meals created by Dodin and Eugénie. You’ll be able to virtually odor the aroma of these broths, pastries, chickens. 

However “The Style of Issues” has deeper layers related to all this meals preparation. Dodin and Eugénie have been working facet by facet for twenty years. How Eugénie got here to stay with him isn’t actually expressed, though he’s such a well-known epicure that maybe she traveled there to supply herself as an apprentice. The delicate encouraging method by which she treats Pauline suggests a private identification with the kid. Dodin and Eugénie share occasional nights collectively, the place he walks via the darkish halls of the manor home and knocks on her door. This, too, has most likely been occurring for 20 years. Dodin has proposed to Eugénie quite a lot of instances. She all the time turns him down. Their relationship is one in all mutual respect, not simply as individuals, however as fellow obsessives. Cooking collectively, for them, is an act of creation. 

Tran Anh Hung (“The Scent of Inexperienced Papaya”) permits the story to unfold in its personal time, in its personal method. Nothing is pushed. Nothing is heightened artificially. The devotion to meals is each actual and metaphor: how we put together meals, the care we take, signifies how we really feel for one another. But it surely’s additionally the fun of the preparation in and of itself, all of which the director captures, with important assist from Jonathan Ricquebourg’s cinematography, the digicam floating via that kitchen, actually peering into pots to observe the greens sizzle. Toma Baqueni’s manufacturing design can be essential, significantly in a movie with just one location. The kitchen seems like a spot you realize, or not less than a spot you’d prefer to enter into. The small print of cooking with out electrical energy, with out plugged-in home equipment, is attended to in nice element, with out making a fetish of it. You imagine Magimel and Binoche are doing all that cooking. 

This can be a love story between grown-ups. There isn’t any neurotic anxiousness or uncertainty about emotions. They’re adults and so they discuss it frankly of their uncommon moments of leisure. Dodin loves Eugénie, and treats her with a heart-aching tenderness, significantly when he’s involved about her occasional fainting spells. Eugénie’s hesitance to take the connection to the subsequent step is comprehensible, significantly for a Nineteenth-century girl. She talks about it with him brazenly in a lovely late-night scene, the place they chill out after a tiring day within the kitchen. She loves their relationship as it’s. She loves cooking with him, she loves when he visits her room. Would this all change in the event that they made it official? 

“The Style of Issues” is concerning the “how,” not the “what”. You get to know individuals finest by understanding what obsesses them, the actions that curiosity them. Appearing instructor Stella Adler as soon as mentioned, “It isn’t that necessary to know who you’re. It is necessary to know what you do, after which do it like Hercules.” Dodin and Eugénie prepare dinner collectively like Hercules. They’re a partnership in each sense of the phrase. It is deeply transferring, and I am nonetheless undecided how Tran Anh Hung achieves this delicate stability. It seems like a magic trick, however in fact it is not. Each selection is fastidiously thought-about. By staying within the kitchen and following these two individuals round as they prepare dinner collectively, Tran exhibits a silent and tender partnership, deeper than most marriages, as a result of a lot would not must be mentioned.