The Taste of Things, which is this year’s French entry for best international film at the Oscars, is a gastro-film but it is not of the ‘Angry Male Chef’ genre. It’s not Boiling Point or The Menu or The Bear. It is not stressful or adrenaline-filled. No one swears or screams ‘Yes, chef!’ Instead, it is sensuous, languorous, soothing and as rich and deep as (I now know) a consommé should be. It will also force you to reappraise vol-au-vents which, in the right, tenderly loving hands, need not be the mean little bullety things that were served here in the seventies. (My mother, I remember, bought them frozen from Bejam. But only for special occasions.)
The film is constructed as a series of sumptuously photographed episodes
It is a film by the French-Vietnamese writer-director Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya) and is loosely based on Marcel Rouff’s novel, La Vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, gourmet, published in 1924.
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