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The Taste of Things Is Ravishing, Delectable, and Maybe Even a Little Radical
Starring Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel, Tran Anh Hung’s film immediately joins the pantheon of great food movies.
The Scent of Green Papaya was a whisper of a story fixated on mundane details, the kind of movie where someone trying on a pair of shoes occupied as much emotional space as a character dying; Hung found cinematic majesty in the murmur of ants on a patch of dirt, the pitter-patter of a frog on wet leaves, the drifting sounds of an elegant Saigon house in repose in the mid-20th century. In subsequent features, he has expanded his vision, particularly with 2000’s delicate multicharacter family drama The Vertical Ray of the Sun(his greatest film, and sadly one of his lesser-seen efforts) and 2016’s Eternity, which told a multigenerational story entirely through the experiences of the women, resulting in a work of bracingly unfamiliar narrative cadences. Then there are all the delectable dishes, conceived by master chef Pierre Gagnaire and prepared for the production by Michel Nave, which immediately place The Taste of Thing s in the pantheon of great food movies like Babette’s Feast, Tampopo, and Big Night.
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