Benoît Magimel

The Taste of Things features elaborately prepared meals that will send a hungry viewer running to the fridge or the concession stand. But of course the film is about much more than food. It’s about chefs as artists who lovingly and painstakingly prepare their creations and about memories evoked by even the simplest dishes. It’s about the passage of time; the change of the seasons; the quest for perfection; about love, beauty and the light the fills the 19th century French farmhouse kitchen in the Pays de la Loire region of France.

Written and directed by Trân Anh Hùng (from the novel La Vie et la Passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet), The Taste of Things centers on chef Doudin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) and his partnership with his cook, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). The pair live and work in the countryside of 19th-century France, where they are famous for their culinary symphonies. Hùng turns their cooking into love letters, passed back and forth in the silence of the unspoken. Food is the couple’s love language, and The Taste of Things is an epicurean epistle.

Not since Babette’s Feast have I wished I could smell and taste a film as much as this one. Vietnamese-born French director Trần Anh Hùng used Vietnamese food to flavor his debut feature The Scent of Green Papaya. Now he returns to the kitchen for some elaborate French cuisine in The Taste of Things, based on Marcel Rouff’s novel. Set in 1885, the film depicts the relationship between Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), an exquisitely talented cook, and Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), the gourmet she has worked for that past 20 years.