Have you ever eaten an omelet with a spoon, especially a classic French-style omelet?
In “The Taste Of Things,” a sumptuous new movie about the joy of cooking and, of course, eating, a character named Dodin Bouffant, whose manor in France we are in, gives this unique omelet advice to a young girl named Pauline. “I advise you to eat it with a spoon,” he says, “it makes all the difference.”
Truth be told, I’ve never eaten an omelet with anything other than a fork, including in Paris, but I will certainly give it a try.
The history of movies is filled with scenes in which the celebration of food is the primary focus. Some moments have become iconic. Paul Sorvino as Paulie Cicero slicing garlic with a razor blade in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas.” Richard Castellano as Peter Clemenza advising Al Pacino as Michael Corleone on how to make the perfect tomato sauce for spaghetti in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather.”
Some restaurants are a flawless blend of atmosphere, food, and theme, such as the former Lanza’s, which was once a popular mob hangout for traditional Sicilian food on First Avenue in the East Village and is highlighted in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan Murder Mystery.”
Then there are the full-length features built around the importance of a meal or an ingredient. A quintet of the best are “Tampopo,” “Big Night,” “Babette’s Feast,” “Eat Drink Man Woman,” and “Like Water For Chocolate.” My favorite of these choices is director Juzo Itami’s delightful “Tampopo,” which is about the desire to open the best ramen shop in the Japanese countryside with the main goal of building the flavors for the perfect ramen broth. It’s available from The Criterion Collection.
“The Taste Of Things” begins with a garden of earthly delights. Vegetables will be picked and prepared throughout the film. Eggs, meats and wines are selected with a practiced understanding of their well-planned role in a meal. Monsieur Bouffant is a landowner, who has chosen for himself the job description of gourmand. Eating wonderfully cooked food is how he prefers to spend his life. His good fortune is that he can do that with ease. He’s surrounded by some of the finest food ingredients in France. In his kitchen, a true and prodigiously talented master will prepare only the best for his desires.
The movie, which is playing in metro Buffalo-Niagara at the North Park Theatre, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year and was then called “The Pot-au-Feu” in reference to the classic French dish of boiled meat and vegetables. In France, the picture is known as “La Passion de Dodin Bouffant,” which is approximately the same title as that of the novel from 1924 by Marcel Rouff on which it is based. Set in the 1880s, it was published in English as “The Passionate Epicure.” Remarkably, the book is still in print.
In addition to a coterie of Bouffant’s friends and fellow lovers of the finest gourmet food with whom he enjoys sublime meals, the story also revolves around a kitchen helper named Violette (Galatea Bellugi) and her niece Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), who is the aforementioned girl encouraged to enjoy her omelet with a spoon.
However, it’s the character at the heart of “The Taste Of Things,” who is essential to the rich pleasures of this extraordinary movie. Eugenie, played by the magnificent Juliette Binoche, is not only Bouffant’s cook but also a woman with whom he is often intimate. Often, but not always.
Their relationship is both practical – her cooking is ethereal – and fascinating. She has the innate ability to thrill a man with delicately, almost magically, cooked food. Once, she is asked why she doesn’t join the men at the table and partake in the dishes she has prepared. Her response is elegiac: she converses with them in the dining room through what they’re eating.
The rhythms of Eugenie’s kitchen are like that of the greatest melodies played by the finest orchestra. Forget what you think you know about culinary delights and bathe in the afterglow of recipes that are prepared in front of your hungry eyes. Sauces, loins of veal, exquisitely sauteed vegetables may very well astonish you. Ingredients are softened, poached, steamed, and roasted. Violette and Pauline learn along with the audience how simplicity really can sing. Patience and practice are essential. Lettuce braised in butter? Why not? How you break an egg can be as important as how you cook that egg.
As the film progressed, there was a point when I thought: have we just spent what seemed like 30 minutes without pausing learning about the precise components of a specific dish? Time flies when the visuals, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg, are as astonishing as they should be and are.
Wonderfully written and perfectly directed by the French-Vietnamese filmmaker Tran Anh Hung, whose first movie was 1993’s successful “The Scent Of Green Papaya,” “The Taste Of Things” is, at its core, a love story. It’s not just about the romance of food, but it’s also about two adults who know their needs and the boundaries of their intimacy.
Binoche and Benoit Magimel, who plays Bouffant, give performances of shared inventiveness. Their acting is inspirational. You never doubt for a moment that Eugenie is cooking from a deep passion for the ingredients and he is thinking of her constantly. You’re cheering the food and you’re cheering for them.
The sense of “The Taste Of Things” is that, by nature, an exceptional meal quickly becomes a fond memory, but to hold the person you love creates a dance that can go on all night.