Image © Jose & MidJourney
I saw a movie called The Taste of Things, I was driven to it because I love movies and other things about cooking, and because I tend to assume any movie with Juliette Binoche is worth seeing. It is about cooking, but also about many other things that made me reflect.
I don’t know about you, but I am the type of person that has no issue whatsoever in abandoning a movie ten minutes in if I don’t like what I am seeing, I used to abandon cinema theaters, it’s a lot easier now sitting at home. Sometimes I stay a bit longer, I keep hoping it changes enough for me to change my mind, a few times it does. Other films I start seeing and they immediately draw me in, and I do something that irritates whoever is watching a movie with me, I pause and discuss, debate with them whatever I find interesting, or go online to find out some information about the film or director. Sometimes when I join again, I rewind 10 minutes, making a process of watching a movie with me challenging, to say the least. I know. And it doesn’t need to be a masterpiece, those are horrendous, and I might see the movie 3 times and do the same. I know, I know.
When I was studying to be a designer >30 years ago, I started noticing the word design everywhere, it was the local hair design salon, food design, life design and so on. This outside what I was being taught at school as traditional areas of design, industrial, graphic, fashion, furniture and so on. I remember growing up with this feeling that perhaps this was going a little too far, that when everything is design, then perhaps nothing is design. Then I understood that, in fact, everything has design, it’s more that some things have unintentional or uninformed design. This film, though not about design and not even mentioning design, is a beautifully designed object, encounter, experience. Everything about it is carefully designed, with the right amount of emotional expression, detail, quality. It basically makes you love it and want to remember it, the highest expression of what design can achieve.
Then there is the fact that it is a French movie, set in 1889, and it does not fall complacent to assumptions of what a movie about cooking should be about, let alone the French. The formal cook is a man, though the character that Binoche plays is inextricably connected to the cook, making you wonder about the roles of planning and execution, vision and design. There are no unnecessary distractions, the French are nice, they don’t quibble, the maids in the kitchen collaborate and respect each other, there is a calmness and human hearth to the whole thing. I then searched about the director, Trần Anh Hùng, a Vietnamese born French filmmaker from a great year (1962!), more challenges to assumptions, but I’ll let you find out more by yourself.
Yes, Binoche is fantastic, in her home turf, you see her shinning in so many ways. But everyone was very good, competent, restrained yet passionate, you want to be there with them, in the kitchen, cooking and eating. Men bond with each other around food and wine, social norms impose a certain way of being between male & female, nobles & servants, but even that is not overly dramatized, not sensationalized to create any sort of tension, you see it in context.
And then, there is the food, the ingredients, the preparation, the detail, the layers of perception and experience, touching all senses. A thing of beauty, a beautifully designed thing.