‘The Pot au Feu’ Review: Tràn Anh Hùng’s Gorgeous Gastromance Stays at a Slow Simmer With Lusciously Tender Results
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic In the rose-gray light of dawn, Juliette Binoche strides through a verdant kitchen garden, wearing a straw hat as wide and undulating as an ocean wave.
She plucks a majestically large, gnarled celeriac from the earth and sniffs it deeply and fondly, as if inhaling mythical ambrosia, and takes it back to the house.
This is how Tràn Anh Hùng’s “The Pot au Feu” opens, which is to say on a note of sensory reverence and a hint of kitsch, in knowing thrall to one of the less pretty vegetables in nature’s cornucopia.
There are people — this critic included — who will watch this scene and immediately sense with a hungry tingle that the film to come has been made expressly for their palate, and there is everyone else. “The Pot au Feu” is not for everyone else, and that’s just fine.
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