Love is precious and pure. Love is both personal and universal. It’s the way it makes us feel, the way we react, the way we smile, and the way we care for each other. Love is complicated, as it will expand your heart and break it. In Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things, love is food and the silence that’s nestled between two chefs who long to feed each other. Is it fear that holds them back? But their silence is a thousand words crashing through their thick barriers.
The Taste of Things is Tran Anh Hung’s love letter to food and those who take pleasure in creating meals and eating them. Based on the novel The Passionate Epicure by Marcel Rouff, the movie is a slow-burning stew about desire and longing. Set in France in 1889, The Tastes of Things follows the life of Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) as a chef living with his personal cook and lover Eugénie. They share a long history of gastronomy and love, but Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) refuses to marry Dodin, so the food lover decides to do something he has never done before: cook for her.
To celebrate the upcoming release of The Taste of Things and fresh off its premiere at the New York Film Festival, The Koalition spoke to director Tran Anh Hung to learn about the creation of a love story, the celebration of food, and crafting a movie that tickles the senses.
The Taste of Things is a romance story about food and their love for each other. How do you balance and intertwine the love of food between these two characters?
“That was the challenge of the movie because normally in a movie with food, you start with the food and then you forget it because the drama takes over. But for me, it was important from the beginning to have the right balance between the love story and a lot of cooking scenes. That’s why you need to have a clear idea of the fact that food and love are the two sources of sensuality in our lives. Then I have to create a fusion of these two themes in the scene and in the middle of the movie. Here, we can see it clearly. It is shown with the cut pear from the desert and the pair’s naked bodies on the bed. This is the moment where the two themes are clearly shown on the screen.”
I am so fascinated by the fact that Eugénie never wanted to marry Dodin until she tried the food. Did the food represent Didon’s vulnerability, foreshadowing himself opening up to Eugénie in a way that he never had before?
“I think it’s a combination of different elements to decide to marry him. I think the main reason is that she knew she was going to die, and she would like to give him what he’s been asking for a very long time. But he didn’t know that, so he wanted to cook for her, trying for the very last time to convince her by making a nice meal for her. She was touched by it, but I think her decision was made before that. Somehow, in this love story, she was so caring that somehow, she gave him a daughter before going by and promising to train Pauline, knowing she would die soon. So, it’s a way to force Dodin to find another cook and make up with life. This was something that is quite beautiful in her character.”
Do you feel that she will forever live on because there will be apprentice after apprentice learning those meals?
“Exactly, you’re right. This is the idea of transmission, because when someone learns something from someone else, the person who will pass it on to another person will say, “I learned it from someone.” Somehow, it revives the memory of someone who has a talent or who was a good human being. It will live forever by this chain of transmission.”
What I love about your directing is that you synchronize the actor’s movements with the camera. We’re in the room with these characters. Can you talk about the decision behind this direction?
“It’s something that came from what I like in life: seeing people working. I also like the fact that the actors have bodies we don’t see enough of in films. We don’t use their bodies enough. We use their face; we use their voice; but the body is not enough, especially the hands. So, for this movie, because it’s about cooking, you can show how they move their bodies and their hands. I wanted to create a sense of harmony with all this, and for that, I needed to have this very complex setting and setup with them moving around freely and complex camera movements to follow them. It was quite difficult to achieve.”
Can you talk about working with Chef Pierre to create the 1889 cuisine?
He’s a very gentle man. He’s a very kind person. I’m very lucky to have met with him. Working with him was very simple because he just cooks. So, I can see how everything works, and by seeing him cook, I realized I didn’t need some specific gesture or how you cut things in a very specific way. I didn’t need it because I saw that he cut things like me, which is very normal, and this really gave the spirit of the cooking scenes for the movie. It was quite relieving for me and for the actors to see how he cooked. It gave confidence to the actors who said, ‘Somehow I can do it, and that’s what they did. The actors were amazing because they wanted to do everything by themselves. Of course, I cast two people for their hands in case we had something too dangerous to do with the knife, with hot water, or with fire, but Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche wanted to do everything by themselves.”
Was there a camera technique used to film the cooking sequences that may have been different than filming the noncooking scenes?
“Oh yes. Except for the first scene, which is the first cooking scene. I had to prepare it with my assistant, and then when we get something that works quite well, we show it to the actors, and then we shoot it immediately. We were trying to make everything better, take after take. But for the other scenes, I never prepare them. I would come on the set in the morning, and I would decide how to film it step by step, scene by scene. It’s a lot like improvising every day but giving it the feeling of precision at the end of it. But it’s everything that was improvised.”
The Taste of Things releases in theaters in February. To learn more about the movie, check out our full discussion below and check out our review.
