SLOW REVIEWS — The things I feel the strongest about take a little while to process. In the Slow Reviews section, I write about things I’ve seen, heard or experienced a while ago. Maybe weeks, maybe months, maybe years. If it’s special, it will last.
I’m less than half an hour into the opening sequence of The Taste of Things, I’m starting to get cross. It’s 2:30pm, I had a measly, picky, pathetic lunch and decided not to get any popcorn. All I can think about is sauces and meat and herbs and big, giant, massive, huge copper cauldrons full of soup.
Trần Anh Hùng’s beautiful film, also called La Passion de Dodin Bouffant, also called Pot-au-Feu, follows Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), a cook for gourmand Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), who both delight in cooking together, and being together.
The film starts with a 38 minute-long unbroken scene, in which a sumptuous and extravagant meal is prepared, served and devoured with unfettered delight. Few words are spoken. Where there would usually be a sweeping orchestral soundtrack, there is only the summer wind gliding through rustling leaves, the thunk of a perfectly sharp butcher’s knife onto a chopping board, the bubble and spit of simmering fat. It is a concerto, the climax of which is a perfectly singed Baked Alaska.
The sunlight is thick, the dusk is heavy. There’s no real sense of time, beyond the preparation of food. We spend nearly three quarters of an hour on one meal, but dance past events that might seem significant to most people. We are trusted to know what is important, and to let our senses do the work for us.
Dessert is served after 30 minutes. I began salivating after 20 seconds. But my delight turned quickly sour when the devastating truth dawned on me: I will never get to taste any of this. It was the only unpleasant sensation I felt during the film, which has stayed with me over the last few months. I don’t think it’s for everyone — probably many will consider it pretentious or indulgent but I think, respectfully, they’re wrong.
As soon as we walked out of the cinema, my sister Ella and I made a beeline to the loveliest restaurant we could find and spent a leisurely few hours drinking wine and ordering little dishes as and when we wanted them. By the time our friends arrived, I’d already got through two portions of mystery croquetas that I later found out were blood pudding, which I have spent 32 years decidedly avoiding. And I didn’t even care.
I have learned a lot about food as an expression of love from Ella. As far as cooking goes, I’m a recipe follower, an excellent sous chef and taker-of-orders. I like to cook or bake when I have the time to do so and the result is usually good, or at least as expected. I rarely experiment, and don’t think I have any natural instincts in the kitchen. I’m quite adequate.
My sister on the other hand makes time. She reads cookbooks before bed, for the stories. She pickles things on the weekend. Her dinner parties are famed among our friends and she’ll begin the preparations days in advance. Atmosphere is crucial, so the tables are works of art, the experience of eating being as important as the food itself. Any enjoyment I took in watching the food being cooked in The Taste of Things, I am sure she felt to a much higher degree, trying to figure out how she might be able to do it herself, were she suddenly blessed with such a magical kitchen.
For me, though, The Taste of Things was about a feeling. Not hunger (though that as well, of course), but I was particularly struck by the romance of the act, rather than the food itself. Of the total devotion, the physical pouring of a soul into another person. And that uncomfortable, troubling, intrusive question: what does that taste like?
“Happiness is continuing to desire what you already have.”
I’m not pretending to offer anything new when I say that food is a pure expression of love. For Eugénie and Dodin it is especially true. The shared passion that binds them together is the essence of their entire lives.
The particular romance between this pair is the perfect display of how a shared passion creates a language that only two people understand. We meet them in the middle of their lives together, not married, but dedicated, in love, in clear adoration. There is no courting or convincing, and yet they are patiently, constantly wooing one another, with everything leading to the question with only one correct answer: “Am I your cook…or am I your wife?”
Watching a slow, weighty story so full of longing it’s strange to think about it and be met with…that is what I wish for.
A quiet love. But one where everything that needs to be said, is said. And then expressed every day through the one thing that matters to both of us. And maybe, once in a while, a wildly extravagant, impossibly thoughtful gesture.
Someone to spend the day in the kitchen, pouring their entire being into impossibly intricate delicacies and labour-intensive dishes for the sake of showing me how much they care. I want them to set one single place for me at the table, light a candle and then watch in silence as I eat the four most delicious plates of food I’ve ever tasted.
I want them to see in my eyes and the sauce smeared all over my face how much I love them. To laugh as I pick up the dish and lick it clean. For them to understand that, as I savour every last morsel, what I’m really savouring is their dedication to me.
The Taste of Things is a patient film. It has to be. You can’t rush meaningful food, or love. It’s about timing, perseverance, trust, making mistakes and learning from them. It’s about finding the harmony between two things and figuring out how much of each to give.
I think a lot about that French country kitchen, and mourn its absence from my life. A lost room in a lost time, with the adoration of two people baked deep into the walls. And buried in the soil where the rows of vegetables grow in the garden, and haunting the shadowed corridors that creak with Dodin’s desire for Eugénie night after night.
A love burnt into stone.
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