It is often said that the kitchen is the gravitational center of every home and The Flavor of Life He wastes no time confirming this, with Juliette Binoche choreographing at the moment and almost wordlessly a ballet of ingredients, pots, pans, fires, which Tran Anh Hung films with an almost hedonistic abandon.
The film will regularly leave the kitchen, but it always returns to it, because it is through it that Eugénie, the cook played by the French actress, and Dodin, the gastronome played by Benoît Magimel, reach the highest expression of love: beyond the sex, beyond passion, there is a transcendence of soulmates that is fully revealed in the recipes that she and he cook, for each other, but also for their friends. And the French-Vietnamese director is permanently attentive to the way Binoche and Magimel exchange glances, silences, smiles, with a complicity that effortlessly reveals a passion that extends to all areas of life.
Will this complicity of the couple that the actors formed for almost a decade continue? It’s impossible not to think about it The Flavor of Lifebut the excellence that they accustomed us to in other films (and just remember the performance Magimel magnetic field a few months ago in Pacifiction by Albert Serra) shuffles the tracks.
The question ends up becoming irrelevant, because we let ourselves be carried away in the impressionistic and engaging waltz of the film, an adaptation of a 1924 novel by the Swiss Marcel Rouff about the passion of two decades hidden with its tail hanging out between the gastronome and the cook, a celebration of the simple things in life tailored to the refined and hyper-romantic aesthetics of Tran — director revealed many years ago by another “culinary” film, The Odor of Green Papayaand which since then has been spreading its visual fetishism, radiant and nostalgic, through more or less successful films.
In The Flavor of Life there is a happy meeting between the dazzling arabesques of the chamber, the simplicity of the story being told, the attention to detail (culinary supervision by the highly respected chefs Pierre Gagnaire and Michel Nave) and the delivery of the actors. And we return to what we said before, to the couple formed by Binoche and Magimel, in permanent delicacy, discretion, generosity, that Jonathan Ricquebourg’s pictorial photography and the perpetual movement of mise en scène of Tran are always underlining and amplifying.
If all “prestige films” were like this, we would grumble a lot less; If the actors were different, we probably wouldn’t praise it so much. But what we have here, now, in front of us, is a beautiful film.
