At first sight, the film the French chose to represent them at the Oscars next year couldn’t be any more French. A chaste romantic drama starring Juliette Binoche as Eugénie, an unsung, genius-level private chef, The Taste of Things takes place in the kitchen at the sprawling rustic home of the famous restauranteur Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), and features every culinary delight known to mankind.
Food is braised, broiled, blanched, poached and sautéed, in carefully curated banquets that can take anything up to a waistline-busting 24 hours.
Needless to say, audiences at the Cannes film festival savored every bite. Binoche says she got the script simply because she knew the producer.
But the reason she decided to make it was the director, Trần Anh Hùng, the Vietnamese-born auteur who first made his name with The Scent of Green Papaya in 1993. “I knew Hùng a little bit because he came on set of a film I was shooting with Hou Hsiao-hsien, the Taiwanese director, called The Flight of the Red Balloon,” she says. “We chatted, and I liked him very much.
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