Year-End Cramming, #5 (Patreon)

The Taste of Things (Tran Anh Hung, 2023)

Perfectly inoffensive middlebrow material, somewhat elevated by directorial flair. In its broadest outline, The Taste of Things combines some key themes from both The Remains of the Day and Ratatouille. (No, hear me out...) Wealthy gourmand Dodin (Benoît Magimel, in a strong, understated performance) has employed Eugenie (Juliette Binoche) as his cook for over twenty years. They are lovers and well as culinary accomplices, and in a reversal of the typical power dynamic, it is Dodin who is madly in love with Eugenie, who has refused his marriage proposals for years. Since they live together, cook together, and have sex when she agrees to, Eugenie sees no reason to complicate the arrangement with nuptials, but then again she is concealing some very inportant information from Dodin.

The most noteworthy aspect of this film is its unabashed food porn, gazing lovingly at almost incomprehensible creations of haute French cuisine. Whoever thought of baking lettuce? And what was up with Dodin and his friends consuming game hens with napkins on their heads? To its credit, The Taste of Things spends a considerable amount of time observing the complex labor processes involved in advanced cookery, and Tran's swooping, intimate style of camerawork is well suited to depicting the kitchen as a multi-sensory bevy of activity. When Dodin takes his turn in a gentleman's cooking battle with the Prince of Eurasia (don't ask), he flummoxes Eugenie by choosing to make a pot-au-feu, a rather mundane boiled-beef-and-vegetable dish. Alas, Eugenie fails to perceive the metaphor. Like her, the dish is perfection itself precisely because of its lack of pretension.

This doesn't really pertain to the film exactly, but as to the food-porn thing, I should say I never found the dishes enticing, mainly because I find French cuisine too overbearing. Often a dish Eugenie was preparing would look delicious, and then she did five more things to it and slathered it in sauce. I do enjoy fine dining, but mostly of the Asian variety, as I seem to be inclined toward minimalism in all things.

A Haunting in Venice (Kenneth Branagh, 2023)

This was free to watch on Hulu, and I needed a break from high-intensity art cinema. Plus -- and I know this sounds condescending, and I really don't mean it to be -- I do feel it's a good idea sometimes to check in with popular mainstream films I wouldn't otherwise see. In general, I'd say it's pretty difficult to screw up Agatha Christie, but Branagh does indeed manage. Many of the overwrought directorial moves that were so campy in Dead Again (the last Branagh film I liked) are reapplied here and cranked up to maximum volume. The stupid canted angles, the frame-warping use of wide angle lenses, the continual half-assed follow shots of groups of guests running through the manor after hearing a scream... I thought Mel Brooks and Clue had consigned these tropes to Room 101 for good.

And it's just an incompetent mystery film. Branagh's Poirot shows no particular deductive flair, and the solution seemed obvious from the start, because Branagh the filmmaker shows no real interest in misdirection. It's just one thing lumbering into another, without any formal concern with laying out the pieces of the puzzle. Rian Johnson is so good at this, so I'm not sure why filmgoers are willing to settle for less. I vaguely recall Siskel and Ebert saying to beware of films whose newspaper ads show all the cast members' faces in little boxes at the bottom, and with its middling ensemble (and an especially terrible Tina Fey), A Haunting in Venice is exactly the sort of film they were talking about.

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)

In its opening minutes, The Zone of Interest finds two Nazi-adjacent industrialists coming to confer with Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) at his nicely appointed home beside Auschwitz. Asked whether they came through Vienna of Prague, one of them answers, "coming through Vienna saved us 56 minutes." Get it? Not an hour, but 56 minutes. The Germans are sticklers for details and procedure, you see. There are certain directors who might've been able to pull this off. Michael Haneke comes to mind, as well as Christian Petzold, or even Radu Jude (whose new film is a model of intelligent political cinema, doing everything Zone does not). But they all had better things to do than mount this airless, self-conscious piece of Serious Filmmaking, the sort of flaccid kitsch that Adorno warned us about.

Every film about the Holocaust -- Schindler's List, Life is Beautiful, Jojo Rabbit, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, whatever -- has had to grapple with the ethics of representing the unrepresentable, and all have come under fire for being imperfect political objects. In what amounts to a sneering "I'll show them," Jonathan Glazer has banked everything on relegating the horrors of the Final Solution to offscreen space, and he is so pointed in this strategy that it almost becomes visual sarcasm. "Oh look, you can just see the tops of the trains over the garden fence." "Hey, aren't those smokestacks from the crematoria billowing in the distance?" "These lovely flowers in Mrs. Höss' garden? Fertilized with the ashes of dead Jews."

The Zone of Interest is so busy adopting a supposedly neutral, analytical stance that it cannot find a tone, aside from smug austerity. Mrs. Höss (Sandra Hüller, in a performance that may be a career worst) isn't ignorant, willfully or otherwise, about what her husband does. The film seems to want to tell us that the Nazis were able to get away with it because of some remarkable form of mental compartmentalization. But no. The anti-Semitism is virulent, and all that was missing was the apparatus to bring it to fruition. The fact that Höss is a petty bureaucrat, or his wife materialistic and shrewish, hardly matters. 

If The Zone of Interest intends to show us that, given the right (wrong) historical conditions, anyone could become a Nazi, this not-very-original message is itself undermined by campy stereotype and dime-store psychology. Even Glazer seems to recognize his own failure to some extent, as the final moments give us a flimsy approximation of Sergei Loznitsa, showing a contemporary cleaning crew tending to the museum at Auschwitz. In its vacuity and misapplied rigor, The Zone of Interest would be merely disappointing if all it did was manicure the Holocaust into a bloodless modernist canvas. But the fact that Friedel's Höss and Richard Spencer share a haircut suggests that Glazer knows full well that National Socialism is back in style. For some reason, he has made a film that displays just how little he cares.