Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Taste of Things’ on Acorn TV, a Sumptuous Foodie Film Starring Juliette Binoche

Wikipedia calls The Taste of Things (now streaming on Hulu, Acorn TV and AMC+) a “historical romantic drama,” but the truth is, it’s a Food Movie. You know, the subgenre where everything that’s important happens in the kitchen and dining room, and it’s heavily choreographed like an action movie, except instead of car chases and shootouts and other stunts, it’s all about this spice and that sauce and the other fork putting something that looks ungodly delicious into someone’s mouth. Star Juliette Binoche sort of knows the genre, having been in Chocolat, but The Taste of Things leans heavier into the formula, because it’s about food and love and how the former can be the expression of the latter. Oh, and be warned: whatever your favorite movie snack is – popcorn, Jujubes, an entire baked ham, etc. – will look like utter trash while you watch this.

THE TASTE OF THINGS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Dodin (Benoit Magimel) eats and Eugenie (Binoche) cooks and they should be blissfully married, but they’re not. That’s the story. The rest of the movie is food porn. This isn’t a bad thing. Food can be symbolic and metaphorical, and tell a story all by itself, and I don’t mean a rutabaga is going to pontificate upon the dirt from whence it came and the grief it feels from having its greens chopped off. No, it’s all interpretive and subjective – what you think and feel while lolling a Dorito against your palate, what memories are evoked by the smell of an Eggo burning in the toaster, stuff like that. But in this particular case it’s highfalutin French cuisine from the Belle Epoque, and, as an average Midwestern American, I didn’t know what I was looking at most of the time, but it looked exotic and succulent and maddeningly delicious. 

I don’t mean to be flippant – The Taste of Things is an unceasingly gorgeous movie. It opens in Dodin’s kitchen, where Eugenie makes him an omelet for breakfast. Easy enough, except it’s 1889, and that means shoveling coals into a stove and maybe even fetching an egg from the farmyard out back, and I don’t want to know where the butter comes from. The drama ramps up when Dodin has his Eating Friends over. He calls these guys his “suite.” There are four of them, and they’re food superfans, here referred to as “gourmets.” This is Dodin’s life. He’s idle and moneyed, the owner of a large estate with cooks and gardeners and various keepers of things that need to be kept. He doesn’t work, which allows him to think about food all the time, like a record collector who quests for that one grail rarity, or the fanfic writer who obsesses over their Hello Kitty/Saw mashups. There’s a subplot where Dodin and his “suite” have dinner with the Prince of Eurasia, and we don’t see a second of the eight-hour marathon feast, but rather, hear their pointed critiques after the fact. Nothing compares to Eugenie’s cooking. Nothing.

Many, many, many minutes of the run time are spent in the kitchen as Eugenie, the maid and a young protege, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), make a multi-course dinner for Dodin and pals. Sauces are simmered, vegetables are chopped, a massive flounder is baked, a veal shank is put in the oven and taken out and drizzled with sauce then put back in the oven then taken out and flipped then put back in and then taken out and drizzled with something different and then carved and plated and cut and forked and run through sauce and chewed and swallowed and digested by rich White men who live for this and say things like “The consomme is so gentle!” Can I call them gastronomers? (I can. It’s a legit word!) Eugenie steps into the dining room and the men praise her endlessly. They wonder why she doesn’t sit down with them to enjoy the company. “I converse with you in the dining room through what you eat,” she replies, grinning, possibly aware that they’re just massive bores who’ll go on and on and on about that one coq a vin from six years ago or something. But that’s just my interpretation of things.

When Dodin’s not thinking about food, he’s thinking about the maker of the food. “May I knock at your door tonight?” he asks Eugenie, and she says yes. It’s happened before, many times, it seems. And so under cover of darkness he pads through the house and up the stairs and down the hall and opens the door and walks in and stares at her naked backside as she bathes. This isn’t quite bliss, mind you. She has resisted his attempts to marry her. She likes things the way they are. They enjoy each other’s company in various ways, so why change anything? But there was a moment earlier when Eugenie suddenly slumped over in the kitchen. She has fainting spells. Dodin calls in doctors who struggle to make a diagnosis. One day, Dodin finds Eugenie looking quite wan, propped against a tree in the garden. He makes her some broth. She’s feeling better and now HE will MAKE some CHICKEN for HER. So he opens the freezer and grabs a bag of nuggets and… no! He knows his way around the kitchen, too, and gets his own lengthy cooking sequence. He cuts and plates and serves the bird and she’s delighted. And he asks, “May I watch you eat?” 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Think of this as the anti-Phantom Thread. I kept hearing Meryl Streep Julia Childing, a la Julie and Julia, in my mind, because she wasn’t the only master of the art of French cooking, it seems. And it’s right in line with stuff like Big Night, Eat Drink Man Woman and Like Water for Chocolate.

Performance Worth Watching: Binoche, as ever, is the portrait of grace and charm, but with a confident, spirited streak that emerges occasionally in Eugenie, making her rich and subtly complex, and I won’t make a food analogy here, because that’d be too hacky.

Memorable Dialogue: Sample dialogue of Dodin conversing with his Eating Friends: “I agree, Grimaud, all conversation must cease when a truffled turkey appears. But this is merely veal loin with braised lettuce.”

Sex and Skin: Naked backside, I says.

Our Take: Dunno if Dodin would rather watch Eugenie eat or bathe. They carry equal weight in his heart, and are forever intermingled. Is it too much of a cliche to say that the key ingredient in any recipe is love? That Dodin grew to love her because she puts so much of herself into her cooking? This isn’t some weird psychosexual fetish (despite this being a French film, we don’t see what happens in the bedroom), but we are talking about pleasure derived from placing delectable things into human orifices. There’s a close-up shot in this film of a jellied pear lounging on a plate, and it dissolves into a shot of a nude Eugenie sleeping in her bed in the same position – this is Dodin’s reverie. 

It’s not saying too much that The Taste of Things is a weepie destined to leave the salty taste of tears on your tongue. It telegraphs its drama significantly, and implies things about the interminglings of food and love that are familiar but comforting and affirmational. That’s not the onus of this film, though – the joy is in director Anh Hung Tran’s hypnotic filmmaking, the camera gliding and weaving through and around the kitchen, capturing the bustle, the heat, the expertise, the texture, the tactility, the true art of cooking. There is no musical score, and the dialogue is minimal, leaving the emphasis on the sounds of utensils on plates, of sizzling sauces, of forks clinking against teeth. At times it’s so alive, I’m convinced, if you lean in close enough, you can hear Dodin’s salivary glands joyously ejaculating. Or maybe that was just my gurgling stomach.

Our Call: The Taste of Things is a sensual delight. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.