The first 30 minutes of The Taste of Things are a visual feast. As dawn breaks, a cook in 19th-century France, played by Juliette Binoche, harvests ingredients from the potager of a Loire Valley château, assembling still lifes of vegetables and herbs throughout a World of Interiors kitchen.
She is joined by her employer, played by Benoît Magimel, and the two perform a nearly silent ballet d’Escoffier that builds in beauty and emotion. This pas de deux of cream and copper culminates in a lavish lunch that lasts until the sun has fallen across the other side of the kitchen.
In Tran Anh Hùng’s film, which won the best-director award at Cannes last year, food is a character, a motivation, and a marvel. The Vietnamese-born French director of the award-winning The Scent of Green Papaya and others had long wanted to make a film about an art form. But he says that he found the idea of, say, watching an actor pretend to paint uninspiring.
Cooking was ideal: “You can see it actually happen on-screen, without cheating,” he says. Showing the gestures of these artists as they take visible pleasure in spending a day composing dishes that disappear within minutes was a simple objective, he explains. “What I wanted to do was to give viewers a feeling of harmony in the work, and also to give a sense of what’s linked to food, which is generosity.”
While the 61-year-old director is only just learning to cook, gastronomy has played an important role in his life. Having grown up working-class in Vietnam and France, where he moved after the fall of Saigon at the age of 12, he says everything around him was “rather ugly,” and that “the only place that had a little beauty was the kitchen. It smelled good, and then there were all the colors of the vegetables and fruits.”
(He says that his wife, the actress Tran Nu Yên-Khê, is an incredible cook—so much so that their family rarely eats out in Paris, and their two grown children come home for dinner almost daily.)
As Hùng wrote the script, inspired by the 1920 French novel The Passionate Epicure, he asked the culinary historian Patrick Rambourg to vet his menu. Rambourg suggested that Hùng also run it past chef Pierre Gagnaire, who immediately nixed one idea.
“He wanted a platter of live frogs!” says Gagnaire. “It’s impossible to film!” Gagnaire explains that he was attracted to Hùng’s “ode to beauty, elegance, and silence,” as well as to the director’s honesty and dedication to authenticity. Over the course of several mornings, Hùng filmed Gagnaire at his eponymous three-Michelin-starred restaurant as he cooked the film’s menus. When asked how long it would have really taken to prepare the meal in the opening scene, Gagnaire laughs and says three five-hour days.
During filming, there were no food or prop stylists or stunt turbots spritzed with glycerin. “Everything had to be real,” says Hùng. Each dish was shot as it was being made and was consumed by the crew shortly thereafter, including the 90 pounds of beef brought in for the pot-au-feu scene.
Michel Nave, Gagnaire’s right hand of 46 years, came to the set to cook the dishes and coach the actors through the correct gestures. Hùng had intended for the stars to have a week of training, but due to their schedules, it ended up being half a day. Luckily, he said, both Magimel and Binoche (who were once married) love to cook and picked it up immediately, rendering their hand doubles unnecessary.
In the cooking and dining scenes, the props elicit as many sighs as the food. Yên-Khê served as the film’s artistic director, touching “everything that is beautiful,” says Hùng, from the costumes to the flowers, to the procession of porcelain and copper pots that will have antiques dealers busy this spring. Hùng laughs when asked if he kept any of the 19th-century copper pieces, all of which had to be re-tinned by the few artisans who still practice the trade: carloads of them were sold back to recoup money for production.
The antithesis of The Bear, with its anxiety and tweezering, The Taste of Things is an homage to the food that established France as a global leader. There are reverent mentions of Brillat-Savarin, Carême, and Escoffier, along with discussions of what goes into a sauce bourguignotte. One would imagine that the French, whose culinary star has waned in recent decades, would be grateful for the boost. But the film came under fire from critics when it beat out Anatomy of a Fall to become France’s nominee for Oscar consideration. The culture publication Les Inrockuptibles wrote that it was an “inflated celebration of the myth of French gastronomy, where food porn intersects with a rancid conservatism.”
Asked about the controversy, Gagnaire goes on an anti-woke tear. Finally, he shrugs and says, “Pff! Let’s just say that we have the Olympics. There isn’t a single French person who’s happy.”
Christine Muhlke, a former editor at The New York Times and Bon Appétit, is a co-author of Wine Simple, with Le Bernardin’s Aldo Sohm, and a co-author of Phaidon’s Signature Dishes That Matter. She is also the founder of culinary consultancy Bureau X and the creator of the Xtine newsletter