The pleasures of food and romance in cinema make an exquisite return with one of 2023’s most underappreciated gems, about a renowned chef and his long-serving cook in their autumnal years whom he one day hopes to marry.

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Vietnamese-French filmmaker Tran Anh Hung hasn’t made many films since his auspicious Cannes Camera d’Or-winning feature debut The Scent of Green Papaya in 1993, but with his latest, The Taste of Things, only his seventh feature in 30 years, he delivers one of 2023’s most underappreciated gems. 

As the film’s star, Juliette Binoche, rightly pointed out, Tran’s film got lost in the fiasco over France’s Oscar submission for Best International Feature. 

Despite being selected over the buzzier Anatomy of a Fall (which could have conceivably won a second Oscar over The Zone of Interest if it had been submitted), The Taste of Things ultimately didn’t make the cut when the final five nominees were announced, and down the limbo tunnel it went. 

It is sad because The Taste of Things is such a remarkable work—and so well-paced in an unrushed way—as the pleasures of food and romance in cinema make an exquisite return, taking audiences back to a kitchen in the 1880s. 

“Happiness is continuing to desire what we already have.”

This kitchen is run by a renowned chef Dodin (Benoit Magimel, best known for playing opposite Isabelle Huppert in 2001’s The Piano Teacher) and his trusted, long-serving cook, Eugenie (Binoche, who was previously married to Magimel), as they serve up one tantalising dish after another. 

Tran, who won Best Director at Cannes, is so serious about respecting the art of food-making that he devotes the entire opening sequence (a good twenty minutes) to capturing just that, by way of an endlessly transfixing series of montages. 

Although already in their autumnal years, Dodin hopes to marry Eugenie one day, and this sets off a narrative about the desire for connection, even if it means disrupting the boundary between the professional and the personal. 

Cooking for someone is often considered one of the great acts of love—with The Taste of Things, Tran shows us how the gold standard of such an act can feel like, up till its graceful wallop of a bittersweet ending.

Grade: A-

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