The Taste of Things (Trần Anh Hùng, 2023).
How do you solve a riddle like Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things? Revolving around the professional and romantic companionship between a master chef and his faithful cook, the feature, which won the Vietnamese-French filmmaker the Best Director award at Cannes, enjoys largely rapturous reviews in international press, yet its critical reception in France is much more divisive. Dismissed by publications such as Le Monde, Libération, and Cahiers du cinéma as a “bourgeois” and “old-fashioned” effort, Taste was simultaneously embraced by the right-wing outlet Causeur, which exalts the meat-centric feature as a return to tradition, and a slap in the face to the quinoa-eating, so-called “woke” crowd. To be selected over Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall and other shortlisted nominees as France’s official submission to the Oscars was yet another sin. Months before its cinema release, Taste received an extraordinary amount of online backlash from those who had not yet seen the film but were confident that it was a safe, and even nationalistic, choice, compared to Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning courtroom drama.
Also traversing the world of French haute cuisine is Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros, which observes the day-to-day rhythm of the ultra exclusive, three-Michelin-starred restaurant La Maison Troisgros, located in the Loire region of southeast France. Compared to Trần’s film, the four-hour-long documentary, for the most part, manages to escape charges of elitism. Although there are reservations about its hermetic milieu as well as a perceived lack of engagement with the labor hierarchy of fine dining, the film is largely positioned as a continuation of Wiseman’s fascination with the inner workings of cultural institutions. As the two films have enjoyed a concurrent run in various international film festivals, the sentiment that dominates the films' reviews, as well as their marketing materials, points to “Frenchness” as the shared essence of the two works. It’s a self-evident, predetermined kind of labeling that appears to rest solely on the fact that the features are a) shot in France and b) have a lot of cooking scenes. Seemingly designed to circulate among a more old-fashioned sector of arthouse cinema lovers, the films and their subjects are also suspected of—and even anticipated to—feed into hallowed, cozy clichés surrounding French cuisine and tradition. The cultural attitude expressed in Taste and Menus-Plaisirs, however, is much more specific than the abundance of food. While Taste is set in the 19th century and Menus-Plaisirs deals with the modern-day iteration of fine dining, they orbit in the same universe where cooking is treated as an artisanal art in communion with nature and time.
Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros (Frederick Wiseman, 2023).
Both films open not with the spectacle of a well-cooked meal, but with its elemental origins. Wrapped in the delicate cobalt glow of the small hours before dawn, the first frame of Taste lingers on a rotund celery root, freshly pulled from the ground. The vegetable is delicately handled by Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), who for the past twenty years has been concocting delectable creations with Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) from their rustic chateau in provincial Anjou (which, incidentally, is only a hundred odd miles from Ouches, where La Maison Troisgros is located). Gathered from Dodin’s own garden, the vegetable bounty will soon be transformed into a mouth-watering feast. Freshly laid out on the table by Eugénie, the ingredients' humble appearance is a prelude to ecstatic culinary delights ahead.
Likewise, Menus-Plaisirs begins with a trip to an open-air market. Here, chef brothers César and Léo, successors in the lineage of Troisgros restaurateurs, pore over the luscious array of fresh vegetables. Presented in a succession of close-ups, the rainbow variety of the produce on display—emerald lettuce, pink-flushed radishes, pearly onion bulbs, and so forth—are more than inert materials; they are also a source of inspiration. Similar to Taste, which draws a seamless and crucial link between the garden and the kitchen, Menus-Plaisirs also presents a way of cooking that is dictated by available produce. The market run is followed by a spirited conversation between the pair and their father Michel, the patriarch of the Troisgros family. Together, the trio rigorously discuss a new menu, including the choice of fish. Zander? Not in season. Trout? The meat texture would require a different method of preparation. And with this lengthy debate on the variations of a single dish, the cooking has already begun, even before the stove is turned on.
The act of eating is ephemeral—the pleasure on the tip of the tongue lasts but mere minutes—but the process of cooking is highly time-specific. Not enough time on the stovetop can leave a sauce a watery mess. Too long of a simmer and it burns to a bitter taste. The durational nature of preparing a meal is vividly conjured by Trần’s virtuosic direction in Taste. While the film’s trailers are prominently set to classical compositions, perhaps another marketing touch to foreground its “Frenchness,” Taste dispenses entirely with a musical score. Trần, who thinks of sound as “the flavor of the images,” envelops the two pivotal cooking sections, each averaging twenty minutes in length, in a sonic cocoon of kitchen ambience. The first sequence is a thing of pure kinetic poetry. Ping-ponging between Eugénie, Dodin, the domestic helper Violette, and her niece Pauline as they prepare an elaborate feast for a group of visiting gourmands, the camera moves as if in a predestined trance. Certain long takes would rest on a character in the midst of wondrous sautéing action before panning to a stovetop on which another dish is slowly sizzling to perfection. Interestingly enough, close-ups of the soon-to-be-finished plates are used quite sparingly. Instead, Jonathan Ricquebourg’s fluid cinematography keeps a fascinating distance, making sure that the characters’ hands—and arms and elbows—are always in frame. From the sprinkling of spices to the drizzling of sauces, these dexterous gestures gain a Bressonian significance, their visual centering emphasizing a usually hidden aspect of the culinary artform: that cooking is also manual labor. Punctuating the clanking of pots and pans with the simmering notes of sizzling and bubbling, the sensorial soundscape makes the visual feast even more savory.
The Taste of Things (Trần Anh Hùng, 2023).
The impressively indulgent plates in Taste were conceptualized and prepared by none other than the world-renowned chef Pierre Gagnaire, who has also appeared on a couple of cooking shows, including the French version of Master Chef. In one skeptical review, Taste was disparagingly compared to an episode of Top Chef. In reality, the ethos and style with which Trần and Wiseman film the act of cooking is exactly the antithesis of culinary TV competition and food documentaries, both of which have enjoyed a recent boom on Netflix and elsewhere. Shows such as Master Chef and Top Chef often set the prepping and cooking stages to excruciatingly tense music; these steps are but an obstacle to overcome. The spectacle—and the money shots—lie with the finished dish, to be filmed in close-ups from various angles, even in slow motion. While Taste treats cooking as its own source of visual pleasure, Menus-Plaisirs dismantles the idea of the finished dish altogether. Though made according to set recipes, the plates in the Troisgros kitchen would evolve and change in terms of taste and presentation, even in the midst of a dinner service. To observe Michel tinker with a dish in real time is akin to watching a jazz musician improvise. In contrast to the battlefield atmosphere of cooking competitions or the solo genius narrative of food documentaries, the labor behind each culinary creation is also stressed as a group effort. Rather than what the elite diners finally receive, it is this constant state of transformation, achieved in the spirit of collaboration, that holds the film’s focus.
Embedded within the ephemerality of cooking and eating, the attention to time—and the emphasis on the passing of seasons—is also key to the emotional world inhabited by the films’ principals. Having refused Dodin’s proposal of marriage for years, Eugénie finally says yes after the chef cooks a lovingly elaborate meal to nurse the ailing cook back to health. Trần, who once worked in the gift shop of the Musée d'Orsay where he sold the museum catalogs of master painters, frames the picnic scene where the pair announces their engagement like a Monet tableau. While listing all the treats that arrive with the season—like chestnuts, artichokes, and pears—Dodin counts the impending nuptials among the joys of autumn. An autumnal wedding for two lovers who are in the autumn of their lives. While seeing the film for the first time, I couldn’t help thinking of Trần’s own long-term partnership with his wife, Trần Nữ Yên Khê, who not only starred in his first three films but also worked as the art director and costume designer for his subsequent features, including his latest offering. While Taste is loosely based on Marcel Rouff’s 1924 novel The Passionate Epicure, the film’s passionate center has a shade of the autobiographical, one that resists the nationalistic readings found in certain reviews. That Binoche and Magimel were once a real-life couple also adds a bittersweet, extra-textual layer of meaning. In various interviews, Binoche shares that, through Trần’s words, she was able to articulate feelings seldom expressed between ex-partners. Like the engagement ring hidden within a delectable dessert of a perfectly poached pear and golden filo sheets, the film itself has become a vessel for unspoken sentiments.
Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros (Frederick Wiseman, 2023).
Covering everything from the altering of the menu to the development of new agricultural practices, the majority of Menus-Plaisirs’s runtime is also subtly marked by the arrival of changes, culminating in a startling, poignant fifteen-minute sequence in which Michel opens up to regular diners about the future of the Troisgros. He too can feel the coming of a new season, and a changing of the guards. The question of legacy is also present in Taste, as Dodin decides to take on young Pauline as an apprentice. The world of haute cuisine in Taste and Menus-Plaisirs might seem insular, yet this preoccupation with artisanal heritage and the longevity of a trade is unusually present in French everyday life. Take a walk through Paris, for instance, and one encounters far more specialty shops—butcher, pastry, cheese, and the likes—compared to other metropolises such as London or New York. Open markets are also a common sight across the city’s various quarters. More than a generic “Frenchness” or a nostalgic longing for an imagined past and an era of cultural purity, it is this ubiquity of artisanality that forms the films’ relationship to the culinary arts.
In the case of Trần Anh Hùng, as arguably the most well-known French directors of Asian descent, this question of artisanal lineage takes on an even more profound dimension. In an industry that’s still sorely behind in terms of diversity on- and offscreen, his decision to make “the most French film possible” is also a radical act, a resistance against attempts to shackle non-white directors to ethnographic confessions. When interviewed for his feature debut, The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), Trần shared that, as a refugee in France, he did not have access to Vietnamese films and thus his cinematic references came from Japanese auteurs such as Kenji Mizoguchi. Thirty years later, in the same Cannes ceremony that awarded Trần the Best Director prize, Vietnamese filmmaker Phạm Thiên Ân also won the Camera d'Or for his languorous Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell. This watershed moment of passing the torch demonstrates how cultural inheritance amounts to much more than merely maintaining the status quo. In a world dominated by fast food entertainment, the formal richness of Taste and Menus-Plaisirs, and the lightness with which they leap from what’s visible on the plate to unseen intimacies, make for a satiating meal of both substance and style.