The Taste of Things
Based on Wikipedia: The Taste of Things
Here is a film where the most dramatic scene involves the preparation of a pot-au-feu, and somehow it works. The Taste of Things, released in 2023 and directed by Vietnamese-French filmmaker Trần Anh Hùng, might be the most sensual movie ever made about cooking—and that includes all those scenes in other films where food is merely a pretext for something else entirely.
The French title tells you what you're getting into: La Passion de Dodin Bouffant. The Passion of Dodin Bouffant. Not his story, not his life, but his passion. And that passion is twofold: it is for food, certainly, but it is also for the woman who cooks it.
A Love Story Told Through Food
The year is 1889. On a country estate in France, a woman named Eugénie works as a cook for a man named Dodin, a gourmet of considerable reputation. They have been together for years—lovers, collaborators, partners in the truest sense. She creates dishes of extraordinary complexity. He appreciates them with the depth and precision of someone who has devoted his entire life to understanding what makes food transcend mere sustenance.
This is not a film about young love. Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel, who play Eugénie and Dodin, are both middle-aged, and the film makes no attempt to pretend otherwise. Their relationship has the comfortable rhythms of long partnership: they know each other's habits, anticipate each other's needs, finish each other's recipes.
But here's the complication that drives everything forward: Dodin has proposed marriage many times, and Eugénie has always refused. She prefers things as they are. They maintain separate bedrooms. They are bound by choice, not contract, and she seems to believe that this makes their bond more genuine, more freely given.
The casting contains a secret. Binoche and Magimel were romantic partners in real life from 1998 to 2003. They have a daughter together. When you watch them on screen, sharing glances over a simmering pot, there is a weight to their interactions that goes beyond acting. They are playing two people with a long and complicated history, and they are two people with a long and complicated history.
The Source Material
The character of Dodin Bouffant did not spring from the imagination of the filmmaker. He was created nearly a century earlier by a Swiss author named Marcel Rouff, who published a novel in 1924 called La Vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, gourmet—translated into English as The Passionate Epicure.
Rouff's novel is part of a tradition of French gastronomic literature, works that treat food not merely as fuel but as an art form worthy of the same serious attention one might give to painting or poetry. In France, this is not considered eccentric. The country invented haute cuisine, after all—the elaborate, codified system of cooking that emerged from aristocratic kitchens and eventually spread around the world. The French take their food seriously because they have decided, as a culture, that food is serious.
Dodin Bouffant is a fictional character, but he represents a real type: the gastronome. This is different from a gourmand, who simply loves to eat. A gastronome studies food, thinks about food, develops theories about food. He can taste a dish and identify not just the ingredients but the technique, the philosophy behind the choices the cook has made. Think of him as a food critic, but from an era before food critics existed as a professional category.
The Filmmaker
Trần Anh Hùng was born in Vietnam in 1962 but moved to France as a teenager. He makes films slowly and deliberately—only seven features in three decades of work. His first film, The Scent of Green Papaya, released in 1993, was also about food and domesticity, following a young servant girl in 1950s Saigon. That film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and it announced Trần as a director with an unusual gift for finding drama in everyday tasks.
He is known for his visual style: long takes, careful compositions, an attention to light and texture that suggests a painter's eye. In The Taste of Things, he turns this attention to the kitchen, and the results are hypnotic. The camera watches as vegetables are julienned, as sauces are reduced, as dishes are assembled with the precision of a surgeon. These scenes are not rushed. They are not set to peppy montage music. They simply show you what cooking looks like when it is done by people who have been doing it for decades.
What Actually Happens
The film opens with an extended cooking sequence that lasts roughly forty minutes. Eugénie, assisted by Violette and a young girl named Pauline, prepares an elaborate meal for Dodin and his friends—a group of men who gather regularly to eat and discuss food. We watch every step of the process.
If this sounds boring, you are not the target audience. But if you have ever lost yourself in a cooking video, if you have ever found peace in the rhythms of chopping and stirring, you will understand what Trần is doing. He is trying to capture something that is usually invisible: the care that goes into preparing food for people you love.
The group that assembles to eat is male and somewhat pompous—they speak of food with the gravity that other men might reserve for philosophy or war. But their appreciation for Eugénie's work is genuine, and the film makes clear that she is the true artist here. Dodin may have refined tastes, but Eugénie has the hands.
Later, the group attends a dinner prepared by the chef of a visiting prince. This meal is ostentatious, garish, designed to impress rather than to satisfy. It lasts eight hours. The diners emerge exhausted and vaguely nauseated. The point is clear: more is not better. Technique without soul is hollow.
The Pot-au-Feu
In response to this excessive dinner, Dodin decides to host the prince himself. But instead of trying to match extravagance with extravagance, he will serve a simple dish: pot-au-feu.
Pot-au-feu is France's national comfort food. The name means "pot on the fire," and the dish is exactly what it sounds like: meat and vegetables, simmered slowly in water. It is the kind of thing a peasant might make, the kind of thing your grandmother might serve on a cold Sunday. There is no fancy technique involved, no exotic ingredients, no architectural presentation. It is just good food, prepared well.
This is the film's central statement about cooking and, by extension, about life. The flashiest approach is not always the best one. Sometimes what matters most is the quality of your ingredients, the care you take in preparation, and the love with which you serve the result.
The Illness
Eugénie begins experiencing fainting spells. Dodin is worried. His friend Rabaz, a doctor, examines her but cannot determine the cause. She insists she is fine.
This is a period film, set in an era before modern medicine. We are not told what is wrong with Eugénie because no one in the story knows what is wrong with Eugénie. The diagnosis, whatever it might be, is beyond the reach of nineteenth-century doctors. All we see is that she is declining, and that Dodin is afraid.
In response to her illness, Dodin does something he has rarely done before: he cooks for her. Not just a simple meal, but an elaborate multi-course dinner, prepared with all the skill and attention that she has given to him over the years. At the end of the meal, hidden in a dessert, is an engagement ring.
This time, she says yes.
They plan to marry in what Dodin calls "the autumn of their lives." But one morning, he wakes to find that she has died in her sleep.
Grief and Continuation
The final section of the film deals with Dodin's grief, which manifests as a refusal to eat. His friends try to help—one of them secretly sends a cook to prepare an omelette that Eugénie used to make for him—but he sends the cook away in fury. The imitation, however well-meaning, is unbearable.
Eventually, though, life reasserts itself. Dodin begins interviewing cooks to replace Eugénie, assisted by young Pauline, who has decided, against her parents' wishes, to learn the culinary arts. The search for a new cook becomes a search for a way forward, a way to continue living after the person who made your life meaningful is gone.
The film ends with a flashback. Eugénie and Dodin are discussing their relationship, and she asks him a pointed question: "Am I your cook, or your wife?"
He answers: "You are my cook."
She is satisfied by this answer. It may seem strange to a modern audience—wouldn't she want to be his wife?—but the film has already shown us why this matters to her. As his cook, she is essential. She is the artist; he is the appreciator. Their relationship is one of mutual dependence and mutual respect. Marriage, in her view, might change that balance. It might make her a wife first and a cook second. She prefers things as they are.
The Production
The film was shot in April and May of 2022 at the Château du Raguin, a manor house in the Loire Valley, in the Maine-et-Loire region of western France. The location provides exactly the atmosphere the film needs: old stone walls, copper pots, the sense of a kitchen that has been in use for generations.
The culinary director was Pierre Gagnaire, one of the most celebrated chefs in France. Gagnaire holds three Michelin stars—the highest rating the prestigious guide awards—and has been at the forefront of French cuisine for decades. He designed all the dishes you see on screen, trained the actors in kitchen technique, and even appears briefly as the prince's chef, the one responsible for that disastrous eight-hour meal.
Having a chef of Gagnaire's caliber involved was not just about authenticity. It was about making the food itself a character in the film. The dishes needed to look not just beautiful but correct—the kind of food that a master cook in 1889 would actually prepare. Gagnaire provided that expertise.
Critical Reception
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 24, 2023, where it competed for the Palme d'Or, the festival's highest prize. While it did not win the top award, Trần Anh Hùng took home the prize for Best Director—recognition of his ability to make a film about cooking feel as dramatic as any action thriller.
Reviews were overwhelmingly positive. On Rotten Tomatoes, the review aggregation website, 97% of critics gave the film a favorable review—an extraordinarily high percentage for any film. The New York Times praised its balance of "joy and sorrow, humor and intensity, beauty and light and shadow." The website RogerEbert.com called the film's delicate balance "a magic trick."
The French title was used for its domestic release—La Passion de Dodin Bouffant—while English-speaking territories received it as The Taste of Things, a title that captures both the sensory experience of the film and its deeper themes about what gives life its flavor.
France selected the film as its official entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards, held in early 2024. It made the shortlist of fifteen films but was not among the final five nominees. Still, the selection was an honor—France produces dozens of films each year, and only one can be chosen to represent the country.
What It Means
There is a school of thought that says the best films about food are really about something else: family, memory, love, death. Babette's Feast is about redemption. Ratatouille is about following your passion despite what others think. Julie & Julia is about finding yourself through creative work.
The Taste of Things fits this pattern, but with a twist. It is not using food as a metaphor for something else. It is arguing that food, prepared with care and eaten with attention, is itself a form of love, a way of caring for another person that requires no words. When Eugénie cooks for Dodin, she is telling him something. When he finally cooks for her, after years of receiving her gifts, he is saying something back.
The pot-au-feu scene crystallizes this. Dodin could have prepared something elaborate, something that would impress the prince with French culinary sophistication. Instead, he chooses a peasant dish, simple and unpretentious. The message is that the best things in life are not always the most complicated. Sometimes they are the most basic, the most honest, the most directly connected to our needs as human beings.
In an age of molecular gastronomy and Instagram-ready plating, this might seem like a reactionary position. But the film is not arguing against innovation. It is arguing for intentionality—for knowing why you are doing what you are doing, and making sure that the result serves the people who will experience it.
That seems like good advice, whether you are cooking dinner or doing anything else.
``` The file write requires permission. The article is approximately 2,400 words and covers the film's plot, cast chemistry, source material, director's background, production details with Pierre Gagnaire's involvement, critical reception, and thematic analysis connecting food to love and intentionality.