Peneflix MOVIE REVIEWS BY PENEFLIX
Today’s internet is gorged with photographs, videos, of gastronomical feats, posted by the well-traveled bourgeois, those divorced from their kitchens, feel obliged to secure a memory of a dish whose remarkability is beyond their culinary comprehension.
“The Taste of Things” is a symphony, a harmonious composition of an art still vibratingly redolent, thriving, throbbing universally; we revere Escoffier, Robuchon, Ducasse, Ramsey, Waters, Child, Garten, a myriad more. Director Tran Anh Hung, with prescient actors Juliette Binoche (“Eugenie”) and Benoit Magimel (“Dodin”) splayed upon the screen unequalled chefs, gourmands, lovers, and passionately invested in the wizardry spewing from their ovens, immaculately devoured by worthy, reverent recipients; here is a feast secure in a kingdom dominated by filmic banquets (“Big Night”: “Chocolate” also starring the inimitable Juliette Binoche; “Julie & Julia”; “Ratatouille”; “Babette’s Feast”; “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” and recently “The Menu” and “Wonka”).
This film plunges to the depth, for all to divinely delve, sense, more than the mastery of the chefs, their ingrained love for all that lives; vegetables are handled with fragile respect, hens plucked with devotion, sauces simmered with incalculable adherence to its designated ethos; wine, the aphrodisiac of the gods, worshipfully accompanied every course; Thoreauvian, sucking the marrow out of life, recognizing that taste can trigger tears, scent can resurrect the deceased, and the palate, the diviner of ultimate sorcery and pleasure; unadulterated lusciousness, longing, heartache, for the ephemerality of all that lives, loves and dies.
After a second viewing I left the theatre lusting for a huge, juicy, chewy slice of a “perfect day” and a “taste of things” to come.
FIVE STARS!!!!!
Peneflix
