Too often, sharing a kitchen, cooks are reaching for the spice rack at the same time, lunging for the same utensil, colliding en route to the pantry, or banging into a suddenly opened refrigerator door. But the first time Steve and I cooked together, almost twenty-five years ago, it was different: we never got in each other’s way; we just instinctively knew how and what and when to contribute to the meal we would share.
That grace, that unity of purpose, focused on fresh, simple ingredients meticulously prepared and presented, is one of the keen pleasures of director Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things. Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel are passionately dedicated and creative cooks, working in tandem — also for some twenty years — in a sublimely functional 1880s French country kitchen. We audibly sighed at the profusion of enormous copper pots and pans, the succulent fresh vegetables picked in the morning for the evening meal, the complexity and intensity of the preparation (that braised rack of veal came in and out of the oven no fewer than three times by my count) — it was glorious. The loving grace of shared process.
But the film is not only about making magnificent food together. It is also about making magnificent food together in time. Dodin, the gourmand manor owner, cherishes the seasonal cycle: the first rain, the first snowflake. He talks at length about the ingredients — the fruits, vegetables, game, and birds — that come available, and then fly or wither away, yielding to the insurgent flavors and flourishings of the next, with the start of each new season: new possibilities burgeoning as the seasons continuously flow. Eugénie, his cook and his partner — a quietly independent lover who sometimes leaves her door unlocked and sometimes does not, who has turned down his repeated proposals of marriage for decades, who does not share the meals with him and his guests, but reigns over her kitchen, savoring every detail of the meals she sends upstairs — loves only the burning sizzle of summer. These are very different values, very different approaches, but they both acknowledge the temporality of what they love. What is available now will not always be, and so should be zestfully, lustily, satisfactorily made much of while it is here.
This point is subtly underscored late in the film by a funeral which exits the manor through the kitchen. Near-silent, intense, and elaborate, this somber ritual marking the passing of a life is the obverse of all the intense and elaborate creation that occurred here.
Later, the film’s final scene circles, cycles, around the kitchen: the fire glows.
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