How a movie announces itself to you is everything, and “The Taste of Things” begins in a kitchen.
Well, a kitchen garden. It’s dawn, and someone is crouching near the rows, cutting heads of lettuce, pulling up a few carrots, unearthing a white knobby thing and bringing it all indoors. The light is coolly blue-tinged. The day is just getting started.
I think it’s fair to group the garden with the kitchen. A garden doesn’t spring up overnight. Seeds are planted in the spring, sometimes before, and the gardener can’t control the results. If all of the elements cooperate — sun, shade, water, soil nutrients, shifts in climate and weather — then you get a head of lettuce, some carrots, some herbs, a perfectly pink radish. The same combination of skill and luck gets a cow to produce milk, a chicken to grow fat and tender, a cheese to ripen properly. Expertise, patience, attention and care, renewed every season.
Those same ingredients govern the kitchen itself, and that’s where this opening scene continues, ushering us into the world we’re about to inhabit, tummies growling. “The Taste of Things,” written and directed by Tran Anh Hung (based on a 1924 French novel but set in 1889), is one of those instant gastronomical classics designed to be savored over and over, like “Babette’s Feast,” “Big Night” or “Tampopo.” As in all great food movies — and shows, too, like “The Bear” — the food is both the point and not the point at all. A great feast says something about the world and everything in it. In the case of “The Taste of Things,” a meal is about time, and longing, and seasons.
All of which is evident in this first extended scene, which runs about a half-hour. The day has barely begun, and a fish is gutted, its innards dropped into a pan to fry. The kitchen is warm and convivial. Two people weave around one another as if in a pas de deux: a man and a woman whose ease instantly indicates a long, trusting relationship. Meanwhile, eggs cook. Vegetables are chopped. A younger woman helps, following their gentle orders. She’s brought a girl with her, maybe 11 years old.
Later we will find out that the man is Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), a famous gourmet, and that the woman, Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), is both his cook and his dearest and most intimate companion. Their kitchen help is Violette (Galatéa Bellugi), who lives nearby; the girl she’s brought, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), is her niece. But for now we know very little about any of them, and the movie intends to keep it that way for a while. The focus here is not their station in this household, or even where, exactly, they are — somewhere in France, presumably. The focus is on the food and the act of cooking. A meal that’s not just nourishing, but transcendent.
They all sit down to eat omelets, fortification before the grand task. “I advise you to eat it with a spoon,” Dodin tells Pauline, who is new to this kitchen. “It makes all the difference.”
From that sentence we learn a lot. First, for that suggestion to work, this must be a perfect omelet: soft, tender, buttery, not an overstuffed American lump but a soft roll of egg, with no filling at all. Using a spoon preserves the texture of the finished egg, instead of harshly severing its strands. But from this exhortation we also discover that Dodin is a man who cares for the small things that make “all the difference,” as he puts it. Why simply eat some eggs for breakfast when you can savor them?
Onward they press — there’s a meal to prepare, elaborate and intricate. (Heaven help the audience member who skipped lunch, gnawing on stale popcorn.) Loins of veal, roasted vegetables, stews and sauces, crackling and boiling and frying and searing. Pastry so light and flaky you can very nearly taste it. Pans go in and out of the oven; mixtures are strained and pressed from one pot into another; fat melts and browns, onions grow soft and caramelized, lettuce is blanched and squeezed and cooked in butter. Consommé, vol-au-vent, veal loin with braised lettuce, turbot, a baked Alaska: Everything is being perfectly prepared and timed for its starring role in the dining room.
This all will be served, eventually, to a group of men, Dodin’s friends and associates. They will trade aphorisms and discuss wines and eventually go to the kitchen to ask Eugenie why she never joins them in the dining room. (“I converse with you in the dining room through what we eat,” she explains, smiling.) Later we will find that Dodin’s greatest passion in life is not actually food, but the woman who cooks with him, and that their romance is the sort that unfolds over time and seasons very like the lettuce growing in the garden. We will even learn, alongside him, that the beauty of love is much like the beauty of a pristinely cooked meal: It is precious because it will, like all things, eventually be only a memory.
But for now we are focused on the balancing act of the kitchen, the way ingredients come together like magic. In the hubbub, Dodin finds a lull in which to conduct a lesson. Pauline’s been watching the activity with wide, fascinated eyes. He hands her a spoonful of some liquid, a sauce, and asks her to name what’s in it.
She closes her eyes and concentrates. She has no training, but her senses are keen. She starts to name elements, from bacon and red peppers to specific herbs and cognac. As she lists them, we see what’s in her mind’s eye: the elements being seared and sifted and combined, stirred together and cooked to the perfect texture.
Dodin’s eyes, meanwhile, are filled with excitement at her rare talent. Across the room, Eugenie is listening, the same joy reflected in her face. What Pauline can do is what luck cannot: She can sense the elements, and also understand the balance between them, how they come together to make something quite perfect. What’s more, she feels great emotion in the task, her pleasure as palpable as theirs. Later, when she tells Eugenie that she almost wept when she tasted another dish, she cannot explain why; it just affected her in a way she can feel in her soul.
I understand. It’s the same emotion I feel when I watch a movie like this one, where elements of joy and sorrow, humor and intensity, beauty and light and shadow combine in a perfectly balanced experience. It takes patience and skill, but also nerve and luck for a work of art to achieve elegance and piquancy in equal measure. You might try to reduce it to a recipe for success, but you can’t scientifically force a movie to work, any more than you can batter a meal into perfection like a blunt object. This attention, and patience, and care: It is what makes all the difference.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
