Review: "The Taste of Things", Celebrating the Birth of Modern French Cooking

Dear Subscribers,

Late last week, I had a tough job to attend to. It involved sitting in my darkened living room and watching a luminous Juliette Binoche chop leeks, add various herbs to a bouillon, spoon a painstakingly-made sauce onto a seafood vol au vent with vegetables, and smile her famed half-smile, as clouds of steam drifted up from the heavy copper pans to partly obscure her face. Sounds of sizzling scallops, of gently simmering stock, and even of hands macerating herbs with a mortar and pestle filled the room, and I nearly forgot where I was.

These were among the pure sensory experiences offered in the astounding, half-hour-long first sequence in “The Taste of Things”, a recent French film that’s committed to the premise that food is love, and vice-versa.

I have to start this review with a caveat: if you’re not interested in food, food history, and/or cooking, I’m not sure you’d find this film to be nearly as captivating as I did. But if you’re intrigued by the idea that making good food is tantamount to a profound act of love and attention, and that, as one character puts it, “it takes culture and memory to form one’s taste”, here’s why I think spending 130 minutes on this film might prove worthwhile.