Finally, a Good Food Movie

"The Taste of Things" Reflection

“Can I watch you eat?”

Rarely is it fun watching people cook on screen. It looks too manufactured to the point of being a parody. I imagine most people think this about their occupations represented on screen. Often what people see of cooking on screen is the rapid fire popcorn-fare competitions or sultry dramas that portrays being a chef akin to a dower military leader. Even the upper tier of these (Great British Bake Off) can’t hide the seams that make the audience question the authenticity of what they’re seeing.

If you ask someone to name a few good movies about food they quickly rattle off Ratatouille, Big Night, or Babette’s feast. Honorable mentions being Tampopo and Chef. But The Taste of Things is now at the driver seat of this category.

No, this is not Letterboxd. You’re still reading my Substack. But the past two months I took a break from Substack, and generally social media, to just…step back. Not for any overarching mental health reason or a desire to be more present necessarily. I just needed to force a perspective on myself I wasn’t used to. In a nutshell, the routines I’ve had the past two years are starting to dissolve. I’ve been a new kind of busy. Though I didn’t plan on being busied and toasted to the point of mental exhaustion, I’m happy to be.

I’ve thrown myself into frequent cooking scenarios the past few months. Something I occasionally took a happy-go-lucky wandering to has ended up a deeply meaningful, and mildly aching, profession leaving me uninterested in a life without it. I’m exploring food in a way I knew was possible but didn’t think I could achieve. These new ventures into professional cooking were the only ways I could stop measuring my skills against others and start measuring them against myself. I’ve practiced the art of being overly self-critical for years but now it’s a fair fight.

This is not about my cooking journey. This entry is about a movie I watched on a plane with a fiery case of food poisoning where no comfort was in sight other than what unfolded on the tiny screen in front of me. This unique and delightful French movie made me forget I was ever worse. If you haven’t seen it, you have time, just find a way to watch it.

Where Babette’s Feast saves the sin for the end, The Taste of Things makes gluttony the star. With greedy screen time devoted to watching each dish unfold and making the audience want to turn it off for fear of desire.

Technically, a perfect movie on cooking. Much has been said about the opening scene of The Taste of Things. Each sunbaked cooking vignette is interspersed with rest and respite. A two-minute sequence of picking garden greens, then making an omelette, having a bath, preparing breakfast, then setting for the next meal carries rhythm like a dance number. My breath releases then goes right back in. I’m inflamed then cooled with every cut.

Why does laying a piece of flounder in a copper pan shaped precisely to the fish make my eyes well up with tears? The simple act of tasting a stock and adjusting the flavor made me lean forward on the edge of my seat. The thing about cooking is, the sights and sounds of its pleasure are available to everyone. And this movie delights in any and every kind of sensory stimulation. Where another film may talk down, The Taste of Things brings you to its level and let’s you participate.

A period piece, historically fiction, but timeless in the variety of emotions if offers. Perhaps set a little over a hundred years ago but felt as if these personalities could represent our desires here and now.

One feeling I was pleased to see represented is how it truly feels to serve someone. Not simply cooking dinner for your partner, but lavish grand gestures that bond you to them. An overwhelming desire to make this person exempt from discomfort and overcome by delicious things. If only for a short while.

Finding a true to form honest movie about what it’s like to cook for somebody has been a therapy of sorts for me. My consistent state is to have those I love, fed. Often to mildly faulty results, sometimes life-ending failures, and even occasional success.

In this film, these acts of service are moments of intense vulnerability. It lays bare everything you have. Naked in every aspect but the flesh. It’s a part of your personality they can now physically realize. Only made better when their desire to receive is equal to your desire to give. Our nature is to make the intangible, tangible. And to make the tangible last longer. To think that what we can offer could equal someone else’s desire is a real joy to imagine.

The fear of this is also apparent on screen. The fear of serving someone a dish to now be at the mercy of their tongue is almost too much to handle. Something that exists in your head we almost couldn’t dare bring it into the world just to watch it crumble before our eyes. So most of us don’t. It’s only when the best side of our arrogance is at the wheel does it cross into faith.

In showing another what we desire, and what moves us, we now trust them to guard these dirty secrets. We hope they don’t flee when they know the truth. They have what it takes to level us. How could any sane person react to this knowledge? We hold back our inner thoughts and desires so as to stay at peace, status quo, or just functioning. Most of us aren’t taught how to give bits of ourselves and still remain whole.

Longing, pining, and knowing how and when to preserve oneself. You are not your life’s work but you are what came before you. Sometimes the sudden introduction of a new character could throw into fragility what you’ve always known. For anyone with a stake in their own life, this rattling is often too much. We are at risk of losing ourselves and our passions on a daily basis because of who we choose to love or not love. And we leave ourselves in ruins so as to make something new. Looking for someone to accept the pieces we were before and come to the aid of whatever may happen next.

In the final moments of the movie, our main characters (having just wed) sit and now have a moment to reflect on what is to come. Words are shared and a question is asked. The answer is the affirmation we need. The pleasant reassurance that who you are is up to you. A Taste of Things is about love stubbornly given and a life freely chosen.

As far as heart wrenching last lines go…I see your “It’ll pass” from Fleabag, and I raise you a “My cook.”

*chefs kiss

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