135 min | PG-13 | February 9, 2024 | IFC Films
A celebrated gourmet and the cook who has served him for twenty years prepare meals together in a country kitchen in 1880s France. He has proposed marriage many times. She keeps her own door, and that distance is the whole story.
Dodin Bouffant is a renowned gastronome who lives to eat well. Eugenie is the cook who has run his kitchen for two decades and turned his appetite into an art. They are lovers who are not married, partners who are not equals on paper, and two people who have built a private language out of stock, sauce, and fire. The film opens with a single uninterrupted meal and asks the audience to watch the labor that produces pleasure. This is a film about love expressed through work and about the recognition that the work cannot last forever.
Benoit Magimel plays Dodin as a man whose hunger is also tenderness. He watches Eugenie cook with the attention of someone studying a person he is afraid to lose. Juliette Binoche plays Eugenie with quiet authority and a refusal to be possessed. She moves through the kitchen knowing exactly what each dish requires and exactly how much of herself she will give to the man who wants all of her. Magimel and Binoche carry a real history into every glance, and the meals between them read as conversations they no longer need words to have.
Tran Anh Hung directs his own adaptation of the Marcel Rouff novel with patience that borders on devotion. Jonathan Ricquebourg shoots the kitchen in natural light that shifts as the day moves, so a single sequence travels from morning glow to afternoon shadow without a cut to announce it. The camera follows hands and pans and plates in long fluid takes that treat cooking as choreography. There is almost no score. The sound design fills that space with simmering water, scraping metal, and the crackle of a fire, and those sounds become the film’s music.
The Taste of Things finds its emotion in the gap between what is served and what is said. Dodin can name every ingredient in a dish but cannot make Eugenie marry him. The film understands that some love is built to be temporary and is no less complete for it. Tran Anh Hung trusts the meal to carry the grief and lets the kitchen hold what the characters will not speak aloud.