The Flavor of Life | Film review with Juliette Binoche

When we talk about haute cuisine – and, especially, French haute cuisine -, decades of cultural association with European elites evoke in the lay public images of delicately constructed small plates, with meager portions of food, reductions of reductions of reductions of “real food”. ” savored with affectation. The Flavor of Life is perhaps the best antidote to this unfortunate association, a concentrated cinematic dose of hearty, luxurious cuisine, measured to stave off hunger and satisfy the very human drive for sensory pleasure, rather than to massage someone’s ego. gourmand with artistic aspirations.

The director Anh Hung Tran, a Vietnamese immigrant who since the mid-90s has positioned himself in French cinema as a teller of sensitive stories about family and romantic relationships, always set in vivid environments with a poetic inclination, turns his camera more than ever to the sensations and textures of the inhabited world for its characters. This means that long stretches of the 2:15 The Flavor of Life are dedicated to Eugénie’s mostly silent comings and goings (Juliette Binoche) and Dodin (Benoît Magimel) in the kitchen of the house they share, frying and boiling, roasting and flambéing all varieties of meats, cakes, ice creams and stews.

In these moments, Tran and his cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg they strike a delicate balance between the controlled chaos of the characters’ movements, throwing instructions at each other through the air, and the solid sensory reality of the products of their work. The food in The Flavor of Life It is filmed in warm, earthy tones, with cameras that travel quickly from one side to the other, but never neglect the fluidity of these movements. Meanwhile, the process is enhanced by brilliant sound design: the grunts and sighs of the cooks, the thuds and hisses of the pans do as much to convince us of the latent art of that activity as the images.

It is this same celebratory yet demystifying approach that the film uses to build its love story. Culinary partners for 20 years, Eugénie and Dodin struggle with the idea of also making official the romantic relationship they have had casually for all this time – when night falls, he sometimes knocks on her bedroom door, and she decide whether to answer it or not. The Flavor of Life draws the intimacy between the two in the kitchen, in the impeccable coordination of the execution of the dishes, in the intense intellectual exchange of defining the menus… here are two people who find their passion for each other within the passion they awaken, in each other, for the thing they love. they know how to do it better. It is companionship that awakens desire, a relationship where one thing does not exist without the other.

It is in this and many other interdependencies that the script (also by Ahn Hung Tran) finds its poetry. The characters nourish themselves with food, but they also let it speak for them – cooking as a service and as an expression. They insert themselves into nature when they walk out the kitchen door to supervise their garden, but they also let nature invade their work in the multiple ways we use it at the table. Marriage and professional partnership, abundance and decadence, finitude and persistence, mourning and transformation. Binoche and Magimel, reenacting with tenderness and intelligence, but also a providential dose of embarrassment, a relationship they had in real life – the two dated between 1998 and 2003.

In The Flavor of Life, one thing always follows another, and only exists as a result of the other. A natural cycle that begins on the earth and ends on the table, without economy or presumption, exactly as it needs to be.