La passion de Dodin Bouffant
Trần Anh Hùng (2023)
The Taste of Things is beautifully made and performed and a good bit too long (134 minutes). Set in rural France in the late 1800s, Trần Anh Hùng’s film tells the story of a creative partnership and a romance between renowned gourmet Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) and his chef, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). The first extended kitchen sequence is fascinating both to watch and to listen to. The two lead actors’ movements around the large kitchen are absorbing; Binoche and Magimel look as if they really know what they’re doing as they reduce sauces, prep langoustines and so on. DP Jonathan Ricquebourg supplies close-up after close-up of the food in preparation – braised turbot and lettuces, a prodigious vol-au-vent, a veal joint, baked Alaska. There’s not much conversation as Eugénie and Dodin, with the willing though limited assistance of young housemaid Violette (Galatea Bellugi), concentrate on their work. This sharpens your awareness of the sounds of sizzling pans, of cutlery on crockery, of footsteps over the kitchen flags; from outside, there are occasional cries of peacocks in the grounds of Dodin’s estate. (It was gently elating to hear this unassumingly expressive soundtrack just a few days after experiencing the bravura sound design of The Zone of Interest.) The whole sequence must run nearly half an hour yet doesn’t at all outstay its welcome. In fact, it becomes suspenseful: you keep wondering who the amazing meal is for.
Curiosity is satisfied the moment Hùng cuts away from the kitchen. Dodin hosts lunch in his dining room for four other middle-aged men: Grimaud (Patrick d’Assumçao), Magot (Jan Hammenecker), Beaubois (Frédéric Fisbach) and late arrival Rabaz (Emmanuel Salinger), a local doctor who comes to the lunch straight from delivering a baby. Dodin’s friends are appreciative of Eugénie’s cooking and sorry that she doesn’t join them for the meal, although they enthuse even more (that’s how it seemed to me) over their host’s wine. A messenger arrives with an invitation: the prince of Eurasia (sic!), currently visiting France, knows of Dodin’s gastronomic reputation and asks him to a banquet – the menu will be conceived by the prince himself and prepared by his personal chef. The invitation is extended to Dodin’s friends, who readily accept. The scene left me unclear on the occupations of the guests other than Rabaz and how the prince knew to invite the whole group to his banquet. As the film proceeds, though, a larger mystery develops.
Trần Anh Hùng’s screenplay is based on a 1924 novel, La vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, gourmet. The novel’s author, a Swiss called Marcel Rouff, was also an eminent non-fiction writer on food, co-author with Maurice Edmond Sailland (known as Curnonsky) of a multi-volume work on French gastronomy. Rouff dedicated the novel to both Curnonsky and a famous gastronomic writer of an earlier era, Brillat-Savarin. The latter is name-checked in The Taste of Things, along with his contemporary, the chef Antonin Carême, and Dodin’s contemporary, Auguste Escoffier. Hùng’s easy insertion of fictional Dodin into actual culinary tradition is, on the face of it, deft (it’s a modest echo of A S Byatt’s achievement in Possession, where invented writers are placed convincingly in the detailed real world of Victorian literature). But, after a while, Dodin’s celebrity becomes puzzling. He’s known as ‘the Napoleon of fine dining’ but I wasn’t sure where he got this reputation or how he sustains it. We rarely see him leave his house and grounds, or entertain guests other than his immediate circle of friends.
The sketchy coverage of his public career results partly from the narrative’s increasing focus on Dodin’s relationship with Eugénie – on the blending of gastronomic and romantic passions. We learn that gourmet and chef have worked together for twenty years and ‘spent more time together than many spouses’; that Dodin has several times proposed marriage to Eugénie but she has always refused. We assume his sexual desire isn’t entirely unsatisfied, however, even though we don’t see them in bed together. Dodin regularly goes to Eugénie’s bedroom door, which she sometimes locks and sometimes leaves open as a signal to him. Inside the candlelit room, he watches her take her bath or sits on the bed caressing her naked haunch. (In one of his less subtle juxtapositions, Hùng cuts to this from a kitchen close-up of a luscious pear.)
Dodin remains quietly determined to marry Eugénie. In another lengthy description of a meal in preparation, he works solo in preparing an elaborate dinner for her and her alone. Although it inevitably lacks the bracing novelty of the first such episode, this second one, like the meal, is finely crafted. There’s another lovely little detail on the soundtrack: Eugénie eats noiselessly but there’s a hint of exhilaration in the tiny sound of her swallowing a mouthful of wine. The dinner concludes with a dessert in which Dodin has concealed an engagement ring: Eugénie exclaims more audibly when she discovers this. She finally agrees to marry Dodin. They hold an alfresco celebration for friends and neighbours, at which Dodin announces that he and Eugénie plan to wed ‘in the autumn of our lives’.
We already know the existential season, and not just because this is a couple in their fifties. As soon as Eugénie has a brief funny turn in the opening kitchen sequence, we can guess she won’t survive the film; when she has a couple of fainting fits and Rabaz mentions that her parents died quite young, we can be sure. This isn’t to disparage the story as predictable – transience emerges as a central theme – but the leisurely tempo makes you very aware of waiting for Eugénie’s death to happen. She eventually goes to bed one night and doesn’t wake up again. Dodin mourns Eugénie and, good as Benoît Magimel is, the viewer soon misses Juliette Binoche. The Taste of Things is probably more eventful post-Eugénie but it has less rhythm, and certain incidents aren’t convincing. Dodin’s friends arrange for another chef to take up kitchen duties. On arrival, she makes the man of the house an omelette, following Eugénie’s recipe. Furious, he sends her packing. Because the film has been so quiet hitherto, Magimel’s shouting has impact but you don’t believe his friends would be so foolishly presumptuous as to ‘replace’ Eugénie without consulting Dodin.
The main sub-plot illustrates that, while individual cooks live and die, gastronomy goes on. Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Rivoire), who is Violette’s niece, happens to be visiting on the day of the opening lunch and does more than watch with interest the preparations for the meal. This child shows a precociously developed palate: when Dodin asks her to identify the ingredients of a formidably complex soup, Pauline gets nearly every one right. Eugénie visits Pauline’s parents (Sarah Adler and Yannik Landrein) and proposes that she train their daughter as a chef. They demur but, after Eugénie’s death, tell Dodin that Pauline is more eager than ever to learn from him. He refuses at first but, as he emerges from grief, changes his mind. He interviews prospective new chefs; Pauline sits alongside, tasting their efforts and telling Dodin what she thinks. They don’t find the right candidate but, in the film’s penultimate scene, Grimaud arrives, nervously bearing a dish cooked by a chef working locally, and asks Dodin to taste. Dodin is immediately impressed and sets off with Grimaud to see the woman responsible. In his excitement, he leaves Pauline behind but quickly returns to take her with him to meet the chef.
These sequences work well enough but it’s only in the closing scene that The Taste of Things recovers its unhurried poise (and Binoche). After Dodin, Grimaud and Pauline have left, the camera stays in the empty kitchen and slowly pans round it (a full 360°). We then see Dodin and Eugénie sitting on opposite sides of the table; whether this is a flashback or some kind of reunion of kindred spirits, in the place where their partnership chiefly flourished, is probably irrelevant. By telling her of his love of the first days of each season of the year, Dodin confirms the twin elements of ephemerality and continuation in the texture of the story. By finally asking if he considers her his wife or his chef, Eugénie confirms its intertwining of romantic and epicurean appetites. Dodin replies that she is his chef. The look on Eugénie’s face makes clear this is the right answer.
Dodin and his friends attend the prince of Eurasia’s banquet off screen but we hear them express disappointment with the lavish fare served. Dodin finds it in an important sense tasteless – a succession of dishes that are individually spectacular but unharmonious together; he plans to reciprocate the prince’s hospitality by serving him a daringly unpretentious dinner with a rustic pot-au-feu as its centrepiece (this dinner doesn’t happen in the course of the film). I have to admit that I began to feel glutted by Trần Anh Hùng’s menu, too. The expertly photographed images of food are, more often than not, accompanied by a character’s description of what each dish is: the subtitles on the screen seem to shove the food down your throat. There’s also a surfeit of epigrammatic philosophising – ‘Happiness is continuing to desire what we already have’, etc. We have friends who don’t like French cinema; that is, any French cinema – as if it were a standard product. The common feature of French films is French people in them. I suspect this is our friends’ problem, although they’d be horrified to be labelled racist. I thought about this as my mind began to wander during The Taste of Things. I enjoyed it a lot but it may be meat and drink to Francophobes.
20 February 2024