The Taste of Things (2023, Tran Anh Hung) (Patreon)

53/100

Add, I dunno, let's say anywhere from 15 to 40 points if you're someone who blisses out watching food porn. Voluptuous images of rustic culinary magic are virtually all that this prolonged exercise in mouth-watering has to offer—dramatically, it's just a more staid (I assume; have never actually seen the comparison point I'm about to make) version of Love Story, with love defined here as never having to say you're hungry. The process nerd in me enjoys virtually any prolonged, exacting depiction of skilled labor, so I did get a kick out of the introductory kitchen ballet, which Tran orchestrates with supreme elegance plus admirable confidence in the ideal viewer's attention span. As it became clear that cooking-as-passion is the film's theme, however, I ran into the problem that I tend to have with such movies (cf. Babette's Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, Eat Drink Man Woman, etc.): My own palate is absolute garbage—whatever you'd call the opposite of a foodie, that's me—and I have no desire whatsoever to eat almost any dish we see prepared. Give me a choice between Eugénie's vol-au-vent and a sausage from one of downtown Toronto's street vendors, I'll unhesitatingly pick the latter 100 times out of 100. Rack of veal looks delicious, but that's pretty much it. A film like Big Night has enough superlative character work going on that it's not entirely reliant upon making your tummy grumble, but Binoche is stuck doing a marginally less hokey variation on politely-cough-'til-you-finally-kick, and that's not nourishing enough for me given that I'm not ingesting cinematic calories via my eyeballs like everybody else. Also, this is the kind of film in which the final shot (instantly identifiable as such) made me recall an earlier exchange of dialogue and then seconds later said exchange got repeated on the soundtrack, just in case anyone failed to make that connection. (Binoche and Magimel's actual last words onscreen are admittedly perfect, even if I kinda roll my eyes at the gustation über alles sentiment.) Looks gorgeous, I appreciated all the yellow...but if you don't wish you could inhale this movie's entire menu afterward, there simply isn't much else to enthrall you. This has been yet another demonstration of why a blanket ban on the first person in film reviews is deeply misguided. Love Top Chef or The Great British Bake-Off or whatever? You can safely ignore me on this one.