Avis des critiques

Binoche and Magimel are two of the biggest names in current French cinema, but they barely seem to register here, thanks to the nonentities that they have been asked to play. Even though the two were once a couple in real life, they fail to generate any sparks in their scenes that might have helped make this believable.

Magimel has rarely been better, but there’s something wonderfully impenetrable about Binoche’s performance here––kind and generous, yet forever adrift in contemplation, she grants Eugenie the aura of a great artist. It’s an infectious bit of cinema: a film that leaves a hundred tastes in the mouth and a nice flush in the bloodstream.

This movie’s ultimate focus is their love, not cuisine, but I definitely never registered the former. The smoothly-moving camera of the initial culinary sections becomes less impressive through overuse, one-size-fits-all Steadicam coverage that’s almost lazy in the ways it follows characters, and the deep blue light of morning and night exteriors seemed eye-strainingly underlit, one thin layer of color with little to discern under it.

A gastronomic feast so rich and romantic, it’ll leave you woozy... The Taste of Things is thirsty as well as hungry. Anyone who thinks eroticism in cinema is dead needs to witness Dodin sitting to watch the woman he loves eating a dinner he’s prepared for her.

[In The Taste of Things,] food as an element of care is not a contrived reading or even a subtext, but the very text of the film itself... There’s also something incredibly thrilling, moving even, in seeing people so utterly devoted to pleasure, to simply feeling good, to enjoying their life right now, in this moment, in this body.

Gentle and straightforward, this is a narrative about artistic process as much as it is consumption, its greatest action being the digestive mechanism it will inspire in your stomach... Following in the footsteps of Babette’s Feast (1987), The Pot au Feu is an exercise in culinary elegance.

Tran Anh Hung’s core skill is that of a top saucier, he knows how to add a glut of ingredients and reduce them to a rich flavor that moves the palate in ways that defy what seems like a simple dish... Belonging to a fine tradition of intoxicating food films, [The Taste of Things] pushes the notion of bonding through vittles a step further.

Tràn Anh Hùng’s [The Taste of Things] is a movie that captures its mouthwatering dishes like edible, gorgeously realized tableaux, combining culinary marvels with a moving tale of middle-age love.

Tran, a practised sensualist, is superb at depicting food as a vehicle for pleasure... Crucially, though, [the film] also recognises that cooking, not eating, is where that pleasure begins. In [The Taste of Things], it brings both nourishment and delight, which might make it the fundamental act of love.

Tran Anh Hung’s sensual French-language film offers up some of the best screen nosh since Babette’s Feast and Eat Drink Man Woman... This is a film in which food is used to impress, seduce, placate and heal. Make sure you eat before you watch it, though, or you will be salivating on the floor.

[Tran Anh Hung] has made a movie that might seem familiar or middlebrow in its contours, but it is served with such delicacy that the craft behind it is easy to overlook... What is sensational—in the most literal sense—about the movie is the loving attention it devotes to the meal preparations.

There is charm and delicacy here and Magimel and Binoche perform impeccably, though I wasn’t entirely sure they go together as the ingredients of a love story. As a foodie film, it has a great deal to recommend it and I found it engaging, though perhaps as a Dr Jekyll to the Mr Hyde of Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe.