FRENCH CUISINE HAS a filmographic lure all of its own. It’s about copper-based skillets and the bouquet of finely aged wines, the pairing of unusual flavours and the digging in wet earth for just the right flavoured truffle that will be sensitively grated into a dish to create just the right energy. Think of baked Alaska with its flames on the outside and ice-cream within, and clear broth cooked to blissful perfection or roasted veal that you can smell from your side of the movie screen. Combine all of this material with the gorgeous Juliette Binoche and it feels like a recipe for a dream film. The Taste of Things (also titled Pot-au-Feu) directed by Anh Hung Tran features on this year’s European Film Festival, online for free and at cinemas in Johannesburg and Cape Town, until 20 October 2024.
Sadly, what gives this film its deliciousness and sensory appeal is not what enables it to sing. The work’s underpinning story gets caught up in too much culinary detail and lots of bits and bobs of domestic narrative. There’s marriage and death, a vegetable garden replete with metals to enrich the soil; there’s the idea of apprenticeship and the observation of cooking gifts in a very young girl; there are fainting spells and the notion of perfection. And what begins as a delectable cook-off between royalty in the town and royalty in the kitchen ends with bereavement and broken dreams covered in loose threads that not even Binoche can save. And we never even get to taste the eponymous pot-au-feu in question.
Weighing in at two hours and fifteen minutes, the film is too long by at least half, and with a story that tries to flow in a myriad domestic directions at once, it becomes like food porn: so much beautiful attention to aesthetic detail, not much fibre to hold it all together. On a level, there’s a energy in this work that evokes Gabriel Axel’s 1987 Danish masterwork Babette’s Feast, or the 2023 Netflix piece Hunger, directed by Sittisiri Mongkolsiri but in both of these pieces, it is how the glorious sense of detail to the eye and nose, tastebuds and culture, segue into a story, simple in the telling that makes them so fine. This just doesn’t happen here.
- The Taste of Things (Pot-au-Feu) is directed by Anh Hung Tran and features a cast headed by Sarah Adler, Mhamed Arezki, Galatéa Bellugi, Juliette Binoche, Cécile Bodson, Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire, Michel Cherruault, Laurent Claret, Patrick d’Assumçao, Jean-Louis Dupont, Celine Duraffourg, Anouk Feral, Frédéric Fisbach, Fleur Fitoussi, Louane Forest-Borreil, Pierre Gagnaire, Jan Hammenecker, Chloé Lambert, Clément Hervieu-Léger, Yannik Landrein, Benoît Magimel, Jean-Marc Roulot, Emmanuel Salinger and Sarah Viennot. Written by Anh Hung Tran, based on Marcel Rouff’s 1924 novel The Passionate Epicure, it is produced by Olivier Delbosc and features creative input by Jonathan Ricquebourg (cinematography), Mario Battistel (editing), Toma Baqueni (production design) and Nu Yên-Khê Tran (costumes). In French with English subtitles, it is part of the 11th European Film Festival South Africa, screening at The Zone in Rosebank Johannesburg, The Labia in Cape Town and online, until 20 October 2024.