Review of the movie The Taste of Things (La passion de Dodin Bouffant)

This gastronomic and romantic drama by French director of Vietnamese descent, Chanh Anh Hung, won the Best Director award at Cannes. And it’s quite clear why. Because there has never been anything more delicious on the screen.

Dodin Bouffant is a great gourmet and enchanting chef. The story takes place in the south of France in 1885. In one of the wine-growing provinces in the fresh country air in the middle of a hot summer… in a cozy and at the same time quite unpretentious, even a sparse bucolic house, surrounded by pots and pans, magic happens every day. Something is constantly being cut, marinated, baked, boiled, and fried here. And then plates with perfectly transparent consommé, crispy vegetable pie, soft halibut soaked in milk, fragrant rack of lamb in the author’s sauce with notes of bacon, ribs and citrus, a lush dessert called Norwegian omelette are placed on the table… The magic is enhanced by white and red Burgundy wines… And all these magic and tricks are made not for the restaurant, not for customers, not for commerce… but for themselves and their closest friends, connoisseurs.

But Dodin Bouffant does his best for his assistant Eugenie. A woman who has lived with him under the same roof and cooked side by side for over twenty years, sometimes even leaving her bedroom door unlocked for him… He never stops trying to get her to agree to become his wife. And for some reason she never stops refusing…

The movie begins with a scene that lasts twenty minutes, maybe all thirty. It seems as if the cooking is happening almost in real time right before our eyes. There seems to be no fakes or dummies in the frame. It seems that the actors are not imitating cooking, but cooking for real, and they are not preparing something for show, but rather the dishes according to a specific recipe, which they are talking about and then tasting appetizingly themselves. That is, the rack of lamb is not a rubber prop, but… a rack of lamb, fragrant and juicy, with a crispy crust, fresh from the oven. And it seems that the fragrant heat from it breaks the fourth wall and begins to walk unceremoniously around the cinema, from nose to nose, intoxicating the audience, already intoxicated by the savory snacks.

“But what is the secret? What is the magic of this movie as a movie, not a cooking show?” – you may ask. And how is it fundamentally different from the rest of the supposedly good cooking movies like Julie and Julia, Irresistible Martha, Spices and Passions, the TV series The Bear…? The thing is that Chan Anh Hung, unlike other directors of other gastronomic stories, uses food not as a means, a plot and visual tool, and even more so not as a decorative background, but as… a specific language that the characters speak to each other and that the author speaks to us, the audience. After all, there is nothing else here but dishes and feelings, no events or twists and turns, as if movement and time were “full” and stuck in the middle of this Provence summer, in the middle of one endless sunny day… And the dishes themselves are feelings, forms for baking emotions, and the process of cooking is like the process of writing the most intimate, sincere love confession, and savoring is a delicate reading of that frank, sensual letter, where every slice, every ring, every cube is a letter, and spices and seasonings are commas and periods.

Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche, who portrayed Dodin Bouffant and Eugénie, had worked together a long time ago and also played lovers who expressed themselves in sensual and poetic language (the novelist Georges Sand and the poet Alfred de Musset in Les Enfants du siècle). And then the actors were lovers and eventually spouses in real life. They had a daughter. Later they divorced… And here on the screen, two decades after that love, they are close again, connected again, just like the assistant and the cook, who have been in love and doing their favorite thing for more than twenty years, and are experiencing the refined, tender, noble aftertaste of a passionate romantic past.

In one of the many tasting scenes, we observe the following dialog between the person who prepared the dish and the person who tastes it: “How do you like it? I think I’m going to cry.” And at some point while watching The Passion of Dodin Bouffant, the viewer notices that he or she is about to cry, about to burst into tears… not because of the drama that ultimately unfolds in a quiet but insightful climax, but because of the silent ringing of pure absolute happiness that fills the shots… of ordinary, prosaic consumption that denies and rejects its everyday, banal nature and looks like a touch of God.