THE TASTE OF THINGS: two passions – culinary and romantic

Photo caption: Juliette Binoche and Benoit Magimel in THE TASTE OF THINGS. Courtesy of IFC Films.

The French romantic drama The Taste of Things is the story of a man consumed by two passions – an obsession with gastronomy and a profound love for a woman. It’s also one of the mouthwatering movies in the history of cinema.

The man is Dodin (Benoit Magimel), a famous gourmand in 1884 France, a key moment in the history of the culinary arts, when the master French chef Escoffier was still in his 30s. The woman adored by Dodin is Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), not coincidentally his live-in cook.

The Taste of Things begins with a long scene (15+ minutes) as Eugenie leads a team in producing an elaborate garden to table meal, with every ingredient prepared old school, the long and hard way. Fish quenelles are formed by hand, shrimp shells are boiled into a stock, and the quenelles are pached in the shrimp stock. It takes hours for a rack of veal turned into an OMG marvel. It turns out that this is a multi-course feast prepared for Dodin and his chatty four buddies. The guys all fall SILENT when the consommé appears, and then, as the courses pile up, don’t say anything more that isn’t about the meal itself or the history of gastronomy.

The fruit of Eugenie’s labor, exquisitely photographed, are the height of food porn. One highlight is a spectacular vol-au-vent. When Eugenue shows up with a giant croissant-like thing (a giant bioche?) that she and the four buddies dig into with their hands, there were audible gasps from the audience at the screening.

There’s even a scene with a culinary Holy Grail, now illegal in the US, fabled ortolans devoured as per tradition, with the diners’ heads under their napkins. Of course gastronomy, as any human endeavor, can be taken to silly extremes, which is illustrated by a dinner for Dodin and his friends, hosted by a prince under the mistaken impression that more is always better.

Eugenie prepares masterpiece after masterpiece for Dodin until her health falters, giving him the opportunity to express his love by preparing and serving her an even more formidable dinner.

The Taste of Things is a film by writer-director Anh Hung Tran, who certainly knows his way around movie passion and movie foods (The Scent of Green Papaya).

Benoit Magimel and Juliette Binoche in THE TASTE OF THINGS. Courtesy of IFC Films.

It’s always a pleasure to watch the radiant Juliette Binoche, especially when she’s playing an endearing character like Eugenie, who keeps resisting Dodin’s offers of marriage even as she values his culinary partnership and welcomes him into her bed. Their relationship is perfectly summed up in the epilogue when Eugenie asks Dodin a question and receives his answer with bliss. She feels loved – and on her terms.

The Wife liked The Taste of Things less than I did, in part because she was less entertained by the long scenes of meal preparation, which captivated me. (I am The Movie Gourmet, after all.)

We both, however, thoroughly enjoyed the character of the culinary child prodigy Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), especially her reaction to her first Baked Alaska and her growing into a peer of Dodin’s.

The Taste of Things was France’s submission to the Academy Awards. It’s going on my list of Best Foodie Movies. It’s playing in a few arthouses now; I’ll let you know when it releases on VOD.

DRIVING MADELEINE: still spirited at 92

Photo caption: Line Renaud and Dany Boon in DRIVING MADELEINE. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

In Driving Madeleine, a ninety-two year-old Parisienne, having outlived her family, must move from her apartment to a nursing home. Madeleine (Line Renaud) cajoles her harried cabbie Charles (Dany Boon) to visit some of her old haunts along the way. As they stop at the locations where Madeleine’s life pivoted, director Christian Carion reveals that Madeleine has lived a helluva life, one spanning ecstasy, tragedy and even notoriety.

Charles’ family is facing severe financial pressure, he is one traffic violation away from losing his taxi license, and he is practically vibrating from the stress. As he reluctantly complies with Madeleine’s circuitous wishes, he takes some lessons from her life and softens. Driving Madeleine is an unflinchingly sentimental film, which is okay because it’s not trying to be anything else. There is a place for sweet, heartfelt movies.

Driving Madeline’s sweetness doesn’t get syrupy because of the painful injustices Madeleine survived in pre-feminist 1950s France. The cause of her notoriety is an act that I haven’t seen depicted before.

Actress-singer Line Renaud is actually older than her character, and she delivers the mischievousness and steely toughness that is Madeleine. The versatile comedian/actor/writer director Dany Boon easily inhabits the role of Charles; (Boon, often cast in broad comedies, is also in the recent The Crime Is Mine, which will release on VOD within a month.) Alice Isaaz is excellent in flashbacks as the young Madeleine.

Driving Madeleine’s opening tomorrow includes the Landmark Sunset 5 and the Landmark Pasadena; it opens more widely next weekend, including at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco.

THE CRIME IS MINE: better after Huppert shows up

Photo caption: Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Isabelle Huppert and Rebecca Marder in THE CRIME IS MINE. Courtesy of Music Box Films.

Set in 1930s France, the breezy French comedy The Crime Is Mine is a proto-feminist farce. Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz of Only the Animals) is an actress struggling to find jobs because she won’t submit to the casting couch. Her roommate Pauline (Rebecca Marder) is a lawyer who law firms will not hire because of her gender. Madeleine seems to be the last person seen with a murder victim, a lecherous producer, and falls under police suspicion.

Pauline “defends” Madeleine with an ingenious strategy – confess to a killing that she didn’t commit, claim self-defense and ride the resultant wave of publicity to fame and riches.

The central joke, of course, is that a protagonist is trying to be proven guilty for a crime that she did not commit. The other novelty is that, in a decidedly non-feminist time and place, two young women without means must survive with dignity by their own cleverness and moxie.

I found all this mildly amusing until mid-film, when Isabelle Huppert shows up, playing a once famous diva of the silent screen. This character is unashamedly venal, and Huppert, as we can always expect, goes all in. She’s hilarious.

French comedian Dany Boone is a talented comic actor, and makes another welcome appearance here in a supporting role.

Director François Ozon is known for his light comedies like In the House and Potiche (as well as his recent drama Summer of 85),

As funny as Huppert’s performance is, the overall experience of watching The Crime Is Mine is more cerebral than emotionally engaging. The Crime Is Mine releases into theaters on December 25.

OUR FATHER, THE DEVIL: can revenge extinguish trauma?

Photo caption: Babetida Sadjo in OUR FATHER, THE DEVIL. Courtesy of Cinedigm.

In the gripping drama Our Father, the Devil, an African immigrant in France is rocked when an African priest shows up in her workplace – and he could actually be the savage warlord who traumatized her in her homeland.

Marie (Babetida Sadjo) is the head chef at an elder care facility in a French mountain town. We see that Marie is talented, competent and kind. There are hints of trauma in her past – a hair trigger reaction to a possible threat, a scar on her back.

The new priest (Souleymane Sy Savane) shows up, and Marie fixes on his voice before she sees him and, before we see his face, she has positively identified him as the young commander from decades before. We wonder how she can be so certain, although that is later revealed.

Our Father, the Devil makes for a riveting character study of Marie that becomes a thriller when Marie gets extreme. We learn more and more about the back story – it’s not just her own victimization that has traumatized Marie. Does violence traumatize the perpetrators as well as the victims? And Our Father, the Devil ultimately poses this question – can revenge extinguish trauma?

Our Father, the Devil is the first feature for Cameroon-born, American writer-director Ellie Foumbi, and she’s both an impressive director and screenwriter.

Babetida Sadjo delivers a compelling performance as Marie, built on the intensity of her gaze and her extraordinarily expressive eyes.

Souleymane Sy Savane, so good in 2008 as the sympathetic, relatable lead in Ramin Bahrani’s fine Goodbye Solo, brings texture and depth to the priest – and his own evolving view of his past.

Our Father, the Devil benefits from interesting and filled-out minor characters – Marie’s dying mentor Jeanne Guyot (Martine Amisse), her cheeky best friend Nadia (Jennifer Tchiakpe), her love interest Arnaud (Franck Saurel), and even her stressed-out boss Sabine (Maelle Genet). There’s not a two-dimensional character or a poor performance in the lot.

Our Father, the Devil has been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and has won the best picture award at over13 film festivals. I saw Our Father, the Devil at the SLO Film Fest in April, where it also won the jury award for Best Narrative Feature, and it’s now streaming from AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and redbox.

ANATOMY OF A FALL: family history, with life or death stakes

Photo caption: Sandra Huller and Swann Arlaud in ANATOMY OF A FALL. Courtesy of NEON.

Anatomy of a Fall is such a great film, on so many levels, that it’s taken me an entire week to mull over why it’s so good.

Here’s the story. The successful German novelist Sandra (Sandra Huller) and her French husband Samuel (Samuel Thiess), a teacher and wannabe writer, live in his hometown in the French Alps near Grenoble. They moved there, into a chalet that needs renovation, after a car accident caused their now 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) to lose his eyesight. Daniel and his dog Snoop return from a walk and discover Samuel, who has fallen to his death from the chalet’s high attic window. Only Sandra was home at the time of Samuel’s death.

The evidence from Samuel’s autopsy might point to a suicide or to a murder. The investigators find something provocative on a thumb drive, and charge Sandra with Samuel’s murder. Anatomy of a Fall goes from a whodunit to a courtroom drama, and then to a family psychological drama, as the trial reveals explosive secrets.

Director and co-writer Justine Triet makes ambiguity more delicious than we could possibly expect. As Jon Frosch wrote in The Hollywood Reporter about Sandra, “But Richard Kimble she’s not. ” We don’t know if Sandra, unlike the famed The Fugitive, is really innocent.

Sandra might be a Kafkaesque victim, unjustly put through a humiliating and terrifying trial, Or she might be an extraordinarily gifted sociopath.

Ironically, Sandra’s literary success has come from transforming her real life experiences, and those of others, into best selling fiction. But Sandra is very closemouthed about her own private life and anything but confessional. Her worst nightmare is to have details of her marriage and her sex life exposed in a public trial.

As the onion of Sandra and Samuel’s marriage is peeled back, Anatomy of a Fall explores just how multi-faceted relationships, the dynamics of guilt and resentment, and how a marriage survives a trauma – or doesn’t. And each scene is filled with ambiguity and the uncertainty of memory.

As the close of the trial approaches, there’s a a Wowzer cliffhanger that keeps us on the edges of our seats.

Although the story is set in France, most of the dialogue is in English because Sandra and Samuel speak English at home, and Sandra speaks English in the French courtroom.

Sandra Huller must play Sandra so we believe that she could be innocent or guilty. In addition, Sandra’s character is complicated, even full of paradoxes. Huller’s performance has not been surpassed by that of any other screen actor this year, and she certainly deserves the Best Actress Oscar.

American art house audiences know her best for Toni Erdmann, where her corporate striver character must react to her zany father’s onslaught of ever more elaborate, outrageous and high-stakes practical jokes by maintaining a straight face and carrying on without giving away her shock, embarrassment and desperation. She’s on the verge of abject mortification for the entire movie. Hüller proved herelf a master of the take and the slow burn. She was similarly exquisite in a smaller role in Triet’s Sybil.

No one plays aggrieved, while struggling to maintain composure, as well as Huller. Can you imagine having to listen to your dead spouse’s shrink testify in public about all of his complaints about you in their private sessions? There are many injustices in that situation, and Huller makes us understand that Sandra is feeling each layer of indignity.

Huller has won Best Actress Awards from the European Film Awards and the Berlin and Toronto film festivals. She also stars in the upcoming Zone of Interest, another of the very most acclaimed films of 2023.

Anatomy of a Fall is just the fourth narrative feature for Justine Triet, a firecracker director. This one is the least comedic. I described her most recent film, Sibyl, as “masking its trashiness with expert filmmaking”.

In Anatomy of a Fall, Triet tells us so much before the opening credits. In just a few moments, we see both Sandra’s success and her off-putting manner, undeniable friction in her marriage, the boy’s visual handicap, his spirit and his loyal dog. And the discovery of a dead husband. Wow!

The entire cast is solid, especially Swann Arlaud (with a fabulous haircut) as the defense counsel, passionate about Sandra’s defense and perhap devoted to Sandra herself, but uncertain (and indifferent) as to her innocence. Samuel Thiess brings Samuel alive in flashbacks, especially in a searing mano-a-mano with his wife. Milo Machado Graner is wonderful as Daniel, a spunky kid who insists on his right to hear everything at the trial, but is unable to imagine all that will entail.

Howard Hawks said that a great movie is “three great scenes and no bad scenes.  There are no bad scenes in Anatomy of a Fall, and there are at least four great scenes:

  • An incredibly authentic argument (in flashback) between husband and wife;
  • Sandra’s courtroom confrontation with her husband’s shrink.
  • Sandra’s testimony after the courtroom has listened to a taped conversation.
  • Daniel’s explosive scene with his court-appointed social worker and Snoop.

BTW Snoop the dog is great. I’m now finding my own dogs very inadequate in comparison. There’s also the unexpected use of an instrumental version of 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P. to great effect.

Anatomy of a Fall won the Palm d’Or, the highest prize at the Cannes Film Festival. (That may indicate that the film is sublime like Shoplifters and Parasite or an unwatchable mistake like Titane, but, this time, it’s the former).

Anatomy of a Fall is high on my list of Best Movies of 2023 – So Far and is playing in theaters.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: friendships on really bad job

Photo caption: Hélène Lambert and Juliette Binoche in BETWEEN TWO WORLDS. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

The workplace drama Between Two Worlds, starring Juliette Binoche, is based on a recent French bestseller that explores workers scrambling for precarious, crappy employment amid rampant job insecurity.   It’s a harsh new reality in France, felt even more keenly in a nation where robust employment protections were the norm until recent “reforms”.

Binoche plays a character new in town, purportedly starting her life over from scratch after a bad break-up. She’s looking for a job – any job – and navigates the unwelcoming world of employment office job fairs to get a minimum wage gig with a cleaning company. That job goes so NOT well, that she ends up on everyone’s job of last resort – on the cleaning crew of the vehicle ferry between Ouistreham, France, and Portsmouth, England. (The movie’s French title is Ouistreham.)

This ferry job is acknowledged by everyone – even the supervisor – to be a hellish job. 230 en suite berths must be serviced, with bed linens changed and the toilets cleaned, in the 90 minutes between voyages. It’s physically taxing and disgusting drudgery – and it’s a race against the clock. Our protagonist is accepted and guided by more experienced local women on the crew and forms friendships.

At the beginning of the second act, there is a significant revelation, which explains some vibes we have picked up and adds another element of tension through the rest of the story, to its perfectly modulated ending.

I’ve been watching Juliette Binoche movies since The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Binoche is always glorious. That’s true here, too, in a role where she is often concealing her thoughts and feelings from the other characters.

Remarkably, director Emmanuel Carrère has surrounded Binoche with first-time actors who play her colleagues in the underclass; they are great, particularly Hélène Lambert, who is effectively the second lead, Léa Carne and Emily Madeleine.

Between Two Worlds is two movies in one – a political exposé and a relationship melodrama. At the ending, I couldn’t help thinking of the Pulp song Common People (and the William Shatner/Joe Jackson version is my fave).

The US release of Between Two Worlds is rolling out; it’s opening at San Francisco’s Opera Plaza this weekend.

RODEO: roller coaster on two wheels

Photo caption: Julie Ledru in RODEO. Courtesy of Music Box Films.

In the ever-kinetic Rodeo, a remarkably fierce young woman invites herself into a crew of dirt riders. Rodeo is set with remarkable verisimilitude in a subculture of young bikers from France’s hardscrabble immigrant communities. It’s an edgy scene, and Julia (newcomer Julie Ledru) penetrates it only because she’s a little scary herself.

Julia is a force of nature, and she is able to back off guys with an explosive hostility. When she is ready to adopt a dangerous new passion on two wheels, no one can stand in her way. Off she rides, on a journey with life-and-death stakes.

Rodeo is the first feature for French director Lola Quivoron, who is the real star of this roller coaster of a movie. If she wants to, Quivoron will be making big Hollywood action films like The Fast and the Furious.

Rodeo won the Un Certain Regard coup de coeur prize at Cannes, and I screened it for the SLO Film Fest. Rodeo is now available to stream from Amazon, Apple TV and Vudu.

RETURN TO SEOUL: brilliantly crafted and emotionally gripping

Photo caption: Park Ji-min in RETURN TO SEOUL. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

As the brilliantly crafted and emotionally gripping Return to Seoul opens, we meet a free-spirited young woman (Park Ji-min) with the decidedly non-Korean name Frederique Benoit. Freddie is French, having been adopted from Korea by a French couple as an infant. Freddie doesn’t speak Korean, doesn’t know anything about Korean culture, and is only in Korea because of a last minute pivot from some disrupted vacation travel.

Freddie travels for pleasure and loves to party – and party hard. She is certainly NOT prepared for a quest to find her biological parents, but an acquaintance gives her a tip, and she can’t resist following up. What follows is an exceptional and unpredictable personal journey told in four segments – the second five years after the first, the third and fourth just a year or two apart.

Return to Seoul features a screenplay without any hint of cliché and a stunning breakthrough performance by its lead actress.

Freddie is brash, impulsive and unfiltered. Her feelings about the circumstances of her adoption are authentic and complicated. She doesn’t seem either needy or resentful – but what is beneath the surface? After all, she does have a visceral distaste for celebrating her birthday.

Freddie is frequently impolite and often mistreats those who care for her with breathtaking awfulness; she dispatches one boyfriend with a line of staggering cruelty – and then repeats it..

As Freddie, Park Ji-min is a revelation in her FIRST FILM role. She’s on screen in every scene, and we’re always on the edge of our seat wondering how she’ll react – for better or for worse. We ‘re on Freddie’s roller coaster, and Park Ji-min is driving it.

Park Ji-min in RETURN TO SEOUL. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Park Ji-min is a visual artist who often paints with latex. Like Freddie, she’s confident enough – in her first filmmaking – to have insisted on eschewing a blonde wig for a black leather wardrobe in the second segment because she saw the character of Freddie as a warrior. After a stunning, sure to be star-making performance in Return to Seoul, she says she’s now deciding whether to accept further acting gigs (and I sure hope she does). In the meantime, she’s become a spokesperson for Dior.

Park Ji-min moved with her Korean parents from Korea to France in her childhood. She heard of this film project from a friend who, like the character of Freddie, was adopted from Korea by French parents.

Writer-director Davy Chou is French-born of Cambodian parents. This is only his second feature, and it’s a near masterpiece primarily because Chou has created an entirety original and complex protagonist.

Freddie’s biological father is played by Oh Kwang-rok, a Korean actor of note, who delivers a heartfelt and sometimes smoldering performance.

I found Return to Seoul to be a thrilling experience, a better film than any of last year’s ten nominees for the Best Picture Oscar. The Wife, while moved by the penultimate scene, was much less impressed. She thought one music-related thread had been ignored for the middle of the film, and was underwhelmed by the ending.

Go see Return to Seoul at your arthouse theater – it’s the first Must See of 2023. I’ll let you know when it streams.

MY DONKEY, MY LOVER & I: it had me at the title

Laure Calamy in MY DONKEY, MY LOVER AND I

In the intriguingly titled French comedy My Donkey, My Lover & I, Antoinette (Laure Calamy) is a vivacious and goofy schoolteacher in a French provincial town.  She’s single, but she’s head over heels into a fling with a married man.  She’s excited that’s he’s taking her away to a resort at the upcoming school holiday, but – at the very last minute – he instead submits to a mountain hiking trip with his family.

Antoinette’s distraught and angry disappointment soon transforms into determination and lunacy – she decides to go to the same network of mountain trails, rent a donkey and encounter him in the mountains.

Here’s what I didn’t know before I stumbled on this film at the Mill Valley Film Festival.  In 1879, a lovelorn Robert Louis Stevenson, with only a donkey companion, took a solitary hike in Southern France and penned his travel memoir Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. It’s common for today’s French to spend a week of their vacations re-creating Stevenson’s experience.  It’s a thing, and it’s spawned a cottage industry of donkey rentals and mountain hostels.

Antoinette can be an over-sharer, and when she blurts her mission to another hiker, it goes viral, and soon everyone else in the mountains knows.  Having prepared for a lie-by-the-pool vacation, she is ill-equipped, especially in the footwear department, to trudge over mountains,.  And, of course, she gets the very most uncooperative donkey.  How is she going to find her lover – and, if she does,  what is she going to do with him?

Laure Calamy is a brilliant comic actress (and one of the highlights of last summer’s Sibyl). She knows that the key to comedy is for an actor to be absolutely committed (with no hint of winking at the audience) to an absurd course of action.  This is why Buster Keaton, Lucille Ball and Gene Wilder were performance geniuses.  And it is why Will Ferrell isn’t as funny as Bill Hader or Kristen Wiig.

In My Lover, My Donkey & I, Calamy is all in on Antoinette, a woman who can be both alarmingly unself-conscious and cringingly self-conscious, and both pathetic and empowered.  Antoinette endures indignity after indignity, but Calamy’s radiance shines through.

The premise of this film seems utterly unbelievable, but the story is based on actual events which are well-known in France, hence the French title Antoinette dans les Cévennes.

My Lover, My Donkey & I may not be Annie Hall or even There’s Something About Mary, but there are worse ways to spend 97 minutes than with the delightful Laure Calamy. It’s opening July 22, including in the Bay Area at the Opera Plaza and the Rafael.

BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE: not your conventional love triangle

Photo caption: Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon in Claire Denis’ BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE (FIRE). Courtesy of SFFILM.

With some of Frances’s top filmmakers on the job – Both Sides of the Blade is not your conventional love triangle.

Sara (the ever rapturous Juliette Binoche) has built a ten-year relationship with Jean (Vincent Lindon), that has survived his prison sentence. Sara had previously been with François (Grégoire Colin), but left him because she valued Jean’s reliability, loyalty and decency. When François shows up again in their lives, Sara is drawn to him again.

Both Sides of the Blade is the work of French auteur Claire Denis (35 Shots of Rum, Let the Sunshine In). With Denis, Binoche and Lindon layering in all the complexities of these characters, the result is unexpected.

I screened Both Sides of the Blade (also known as Fire) earlier this year for this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). It opens in Bay Area theaters this week.