A Friday Lagniappe: The Taste of Things
A film by Tràn Anh Hùng, starring Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel
I saw this movie yesterday for the second time in three days, and I must confess I don’t think a film has struck me so deeply since I was taken to Bambi when I was five or six years old.
First of all: There is no music. No music at all, not even a genteel thread of background Brahms appropriate to the late 19th century setting, no music over the credits or opening scene. No sound except the sounds of the place, of the kitchen, of the countryside, human speech, a little bird song, the genteel mooing of a herd of Limousins, no clashing of voices, everything is luxe, calme et volupté, to quote Baudelaire. And the human voices are calm too, level, never raised (just once, toward the end), never sharp, expressing love for the task at hand, the preparation of a meal, of a dish, admiration of a person, of a place. Only rarely does anxiety lend a voice the intensity of care. The loudest sound, besides the cows, is the clop of old-fashioned wooden clogs along a garden path.
Then, after the silence, the cinematography, the camera which is deeply in love with light and texture, embracing, caressing the sunlight that angles through big windows and bathes the kitchen in gold, the green twilight that embraces two people sitting by the river at dusk, candlelight and firelight flickering in an otherwise darkened room, summer sun on a field of wild flowers through which two human figures move. But above all, the light that glows and warms the kitchen in which so much of the action takes place. It's light as a subject for the camera as much as it was a subject for the Impressionists who were painting at the time the film takes place.
And texture—worn tile floors, old, scrubbed plates and bowls, gleaming copper pots, the grain of a wooden table top, a turkey’s glistening guts pulled out onto that table top, the feel of a well rope in the servant’s hands as she pulls up a brimming bucket, the pewter spoon that offers a taste of broth to a child’s eager lips, the textures of a head of lettuce, transmuting as it’s harvested, rinsed, blanched, drained, patted into shape, braised in a pan, and finally served on a platter next to a thick, pale, pink slice of veal.
The opening shot sets the mood of what we will experience: a gardener’s muddy hand pulls a hefty celeriac root from the rich, dark, garden soil, strokes with a knife the bulbous sides, then passes it to the cook. We do not see faces at first, we hear no voices to explain, we see only hands and the hands bespeak their owners, the roughness of the gardener’s, then the cook’s, which are rough in a different way, more feminine but still the chapped hands of a worker. And then the camera pulls back to show the potager with its treasure of artichokes and vines, fruit trees and regular rows of lettuces, and the cook, Juliette Binoche, moving along, only stopping to bend and slice a lettuce at the roots and add it to her panier, her garden basket.
This is a film about love but it’s not a romance. And yet it is a romance for this is a kitchen that never existed, that never could exist, a romanticized kitchen in which nothing burns, nothing spills, no dishes pile up in the sink, no voices are raised, and the reigning mood is politesse, that odd characteristic of the French on which they still so insist. Hands are offered and shaken every time there’s a new encounter, even between master and servant, and the diners, five bourgeois gentlemen of varying degrees of portliness, salute the cook after their copious lunch with a kiss on the cheeks, not once, but un, deux, trois fois.
And that lunch, again the camera caresses each dish, from the clear, deep amber consommé to a towering bronzed vol au vent filled with creamy vegetables, a romboid turbot poached in cream and wine with delicate quenelles on the side, then that veal braised with the vivid green bundles of lettuce, and finally concluding with what the cooks and the host refer to as an omelette norvégienne but is given the indelicate subtitle of “baked Alaska” (who knew? my companion murmured beside me). For curious cooks, this is a double layer cake, the center of which is filled with ice cream and then covered in a meringue festooned with meringue rosettes, baked in the oven, and served flambée at the table. It is an invention of Balzac, one of the bourgeois gentilhommes explains—the cook, he quickly adds lest one think it might be the novelist—and the meringue acts as insulation, baking and crisping on the outside while the ice cream remains softly gelée.
How, modern viewers ask, could anyone eat so much at one seating?
So, it’s a romance in that way too, impossible to imagine, although we have plenty of assurances from diaries and cookbooks of the time that people did indeed consume these vast lunches, at least on occasion. Superficially, the film is a romance of food and of the cooks who produce it and yet it’s much, much deeper than that. It is a profound story of mature love, that is, a love between two aging adults who have lived and worked together, side by side, for 20 years doing what they love best. (They’re not old, let me assure you, but they are decidedly mature--in their autumn years, they insist at one point.) It’s a love affair of restrained and controlled passion, the restraint operating to deepen the love. The most sensual moment—and please don’t laugh because it’s deeply affecting—comes when the man, Dodin, enters the bedroom to see his love, Eugénie, lying asleep on her side, her back to him, unclothed, the elegant curve of her buttocks and spine imitating the equally elegant curve of the two poached pears that he has laid gently on a plate to serve for her dessert. (It doesn’t detract from the film to know that Binoche and Magimel were a couple at some point in the past and in fact share a child.)
I am grateful for what seems to have been an extraordinary spate of interesting, engaging, diverting, and thoughtful films lately, beginning in the summer with Oppenheimer which, for all its bombast (I choose the word deliberately), was a disturbingly provocative movie. I didn’t see Barbie, having managed to avoid the entire phenomenon throughout my own and my daughter’s childhoods. Origin was another difficult movie—I’m not sure I agree with Wilkerson’s thesis but it’s challenging for sure and in the best way, forcing you to think through the distinctions. Another film that provoked me to experience the Holocaust yet again, but from an unnervingly different perspective, was Zone of Interest which left me with that familiar feeling of it-couldn’t-happen-here. And yet, why not? Finally, I’m looking forward to a comedy, but a Black comedy in both senses of the word, American Fiction, which arrives at my wonderful local, The Strand in Rockland, Maine, at the weekend. And I will not miss it!
Nancy, this is as lusciously a written essay as the movie is visually. Beautiful. Thank you.
There was a restuarant on Boston, with dark .felt covered walls. , called Doudin.It was an experience to go there, which I did.