Gastronomic feast on big screen: 'The Taste of Things' is all about love and food

"The Taste of Things," directed by Trần Anh Hùng, which will be screened in select theaters Friday, garners the attention of moviegoers with its food-related scenes, and like most films about food, it has as much to do with love and art as it does with recipes and their flavorful cinematic shots.

Inspired by Marcel Rouff's classic 1924 novel "The Passionate Epicure", "The Taste of Things" is an even more poignant love story because Binoche and Magimel were a couple 20 years ago.

Considered as an apt example of how a movie can be a visual feast, the film starring Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel opens with a sumptuous 40-minute scene set in a French country kitchen in the late 19th century.

Hùng, a French-Vietnamese filmmaker, credits his love for cinema to his father, who would come home to South Vietnam and make a detailed analysis of the films he had seen at the cinema, and his mother's kitchen giving him his first sense of beauty and aesthetics.

It is quite obvious that the cast and crew of "The Taste of Things" had a feast on set as every dish in the movie has the design signature of Pierre Gagnaire, a renowned French chef.

Interestingly, each dish was cooked on-site by Michel Nave.

For the film's final meal, a triumphant pot-au-feu, about 40 kilograms (88.1 pounds) was prepared to celebrate the wrapup of the film.

Source: Newsroom & & Associated Press