The Taste of Things, and what gives life texture.

Adapted from: a long time away.

A near-stranger told me I would love The Taste of Things, Trần Anh Hùng’s latest film. It’s a food-centered romantic drama starring Juliette Binoche and Benoit Magimel, set in rural France in the late 1800s. The film has mixed reviews. It’s lauded as a rich ode to pleasure, and dismissed for its watery narrative arc. Both ring true. What I will say is this: some encounters feel quotidian at first, but later we find them ripened with meaning. I suspect that’ll be the case here.

In my version of this, it’s a love story between the camera and the act of cooking. Their chemistry is obvious from the get-go. The film’s introductory scene takes place in a beautiful kitchen, replete with all of its hums and hisses—sunlit, spacious, rustic, the stuff of dreams. In it, we follow our characters as they prepare an embarrassment of riches: A milk-poached turbot. A seafood vol-au-vent. A perfectly-pink rack of veal. It’s a languid choreography that transports us from counter to pot, oven to plate, fork to mouth. The whole thing takes over half an hour. I was beside myself.

We see meringue mounted to perfect airy peaks and lacquered sauces that part with the swipe of a finger. We hear the gelatinous quiver of a caviar dollop, the steely grazes of a brisk whisk. We feel—feel—when the knife goes through the veal: like sinking into butter. The cinematography and sound design work in perfect concert; the result is textural, meditative, transcendent. It’s as though the film is saying, Do you see what we see? Do you get it? We have no choice but to fall in love, too.

In the hands of another director, it might have felt excessive. Food-porny. Obscene. But what lingers instead is the brightness of reverence, the sweetness of attention. Food through this slow, intimate lens no longer feels like it exists in the realm of mortals—the sublime is in the details, as they say. My friend M. and I left the theatre feeling nourished and famished at the same time. Spiritually fortified, yet hungry for life. We marked the occasion with a vivid glass of Sicilian red and truffle honey on ricotta toast. Funny how some pictures on a screen can teach you how to taste.

As you may have gleaned from my absence here, I haven’t felt much of that hunger lately. If anything, my days have felt tepid, textureless, with theirs highs and lows buffed away. Is this depression? Dopamine dysregulation? Life while being witness to endless horror? I’m not sure. But I don’t move through life the way I used to, and I’m trying to find my way back. This movie helps. Remembering why I love what I love helps.

What feels most remarkable about The Taste of Things is the pace. How it takes its time to go nowhere far. How it reveres the long prep, not the finished plate. How its depiction of love is inextricable from labor. It embodies a school of thought that runs counter to how we consume food these days. Our recipes shouldn’t be a series of 1 second clips frenetically cut to Doja Cat. Our reviews shouldn’t consist of “10 out of 10s” illuminated by the artificial hues of an influencer’s light. Let’s wash our produce slowly and linger in the kitchen longer—let’s give meaning the time it needs to ripen.

With love and a side of Hunanese takeout that’s bringing tears to my eyes,

Tracy