Transcript: Culture chat — ‘The Taste of Things’, starring Juliette Binoche 

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Culture chat — ‘The Taste of Things’, starring Juliette Binoche’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos, and this is our Friday chat show. Today we are talking about the new French film The Taste of Things, which is directed by Tran Anh Hung. It stars Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel as two people who have devoted their lives to food as an art form — he as a food connoisseur and a gentleman of leisure, she as his extremely talented cook. The film is set in the 1880s, and it is both an ode to cooking and a low-simmering love story. The Taste of Things is France’s entry for best foreign film at the Oscars, and it has gotten a ton of praise for its technical mastery and luscious presentation. So today, we’re here to get into it.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos, and I’m preparing an eight-hour meal for the Prince of Eurasia. Joining me from London is Harriet Fitch Little, the FT’s food and drink editor. She is a champagne pulled from a shipwreck at the bottom of the sea. Hi, Harriet.

Harriet Fitch Little
Hi. I always appreciate your introductions, Lilah. Like, watching this film, I was like, I don’t know what she’s gonna be able to pull out. But you did.

Lilah Raptopoulos
We did it. Also from London, another friend of the podcast, the FT’s resident gourmand, our food critic Tim Hayward. Welcome, Tim.

Tim Hayward
Thank you very much.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m really thrilled to have you both here, especially to talk about this film, because I have tons of questions and I found it really interesting. But before we get into reactions, I thought we could talk a little bit about what’s happening in this film for anyone who hasn’t seen it. What do you think people need to know?

Tim Hayward
I think it’s visually sumptuous. If you’re not a massive foodie, you’re gonna be bored rigid. But if you are, you’re gonna love it on pretty much every sort of level. And it’s slow. It’s very, very slow and very gentle and very romantic and sweet.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Harriet, how would you describe it? It did feel to me like a kind of like a cinematic vegetable still-life.

Harriet Fitch Little
Right. It reminds me a bit of that film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, where you essentially have a quite tight focus on relationship between two people living in this slightly isolated kingdom, in this case a 19th-century French sort of, I mean, I don’t know what it is — a sort of country château, isn’t it?

Tim Hayward
Yeah, it’s a very French set-up. It really is. The kind of place we have to pay a lot of money to go on holiday.

Harriet Fitch Little
Yeah and, you know, a man and his cook. And that’s not putting her down. That’s explicitly what she wants to be referred to as it comes up quite a lot in the film, doesn’t it, that she really sees herself as the cook before anything else. And he seems to . . . I mean, I don’t know what his job is. Did you work that out, Tim? (Laughter) He seems to have a lot of money to have dinners with his friends and think about French food, but I’ve got no idea how he got the money or the château that he lives in.

Tim Hayward
I think it’s the gentleman of leisure thing, isn’t it?

Harriet Fitch Little
It is. But how?

Tim Hayward
He’s got enough money from somewhere, possibly inherited, possibly from running some terribly oppressive factory in Lille. But he doesn’t have to worry about much. I do love the idea of being a sort of significant food individual, paying a servant to do the work. I find that quite baffling. There was a bunch of blokes sitting in there going, “Uhuh, huh, huh” about various things she’d cook, but very few of them actually picked up a pan at any point until she was too sick to do it herself. That seemed unfair in many ways.

Lilah Raptopoulos
To set the scene also, the first scene is about 37 minutes, and it’s of them and two assistants cooking a meal in this beautiful kitchen. You see how things are cooked in the 1880s. You see them pulling water from a well. There’s no electricity. They’re sort of picking the lettuce. You see the number of steps that it takes to make everything. And then they’re bringing it up to this dining room to feed his friends. And just to really all they’re doing is talking about food.

Harriet Fitch Little
That’s the film. Yeah. You got it, Lilah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the film. OK, so why don’t we back up a little and just big picture: What did you both think of the film? Did you like it?

Harriet Fitch Little
I would say I’m worried that not liking it will sort of out me as not being particularly good at my job, and not enough of a foodie as the food and drink editor. I mean, I think I basically found the visuals absolutely beautiful, and I really did enjoy watching the food being cooked. I think as a film in general, perhaps there wasn’t enough emotional tension to bring me through it. Yeah, I mean, sure, we’ll talk about it more, but it’s a film that doesn’t really problematise any of the dynamics within it, right, of which there are many. I kept on, in this film sort of waiting for the drama or the bad person to enter. And at first I thought it was gonna be him. You know, she’s the put-upon cook, but no, he’s, you know, a lovely man who comes and helps her cook and clearly views her as an equal. And then you think, OK, maybe it’s gonna be his friends who are the, you know, patriarchal adversary who don’t really treat her seriously and give him all the credit. But no. They are lovely men who take her very seriously as well, and know that she’s an equal party in this, and it sort of went on and on like that until I realise about halfway through the film that it wasn’t going to be that sort of an opposing force.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Who’s the bad guy? Yeah, I had trouble with that too.

Tim Hayward
I think gout is the bad guy, to be honest.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Gout’s the bad guy. (Laughter)

Tim Hayward
It could have done with more sort of action in that department, I suppose. I think the thing you can’t get away from is also, the English are massively jealous of the French about two things. And those two things are food and love or sex. And I think it idealises both of those things in a way that if you’re being practical about it and you switch your brain in when you watch the film, you’re screaming at the screen and going, no, no, this can’t and literally can’t be. But actually you will so quietly just go, oh God, it’s so beautiful, so beautiful. And it really is. I loved it, I loved it, and I also came away from it feeling I didn’t have my brain switched on.

Harriet Fitch Little
Lilah, what did you think is someone who stands outside the sort of British-French fetishisation? What did you think of it from a slightly more removed perspective?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes. Well, I don’t have sort of, like, a complicated relationship with the French . . . 

Harriet Fitch Little
Unlike the rest of us. Yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
. . . in quite the same way. So I felt that I could fully enjoy it in that way. The cooking scenes, I honestly would have skipped the love story and watched an hour and a half of them cooking and eating. That was totally beautiful and I enjoyed it. But I have to say, I felt that I was missing something for most of it, and I was trying to figure out what that was, and I listened to an interview with the director Tran Anh Hung afterwards, and I started to realise, oh, of course, this is about this time period when French cuisine was sort of being codified. Like, this is an actual time period in French history, where you have chefs taking French food from the everyday to this elevated, cultured sort of art form, like they’re inventing haute cuisine. We’re watching them sort of invent haute cuisine. And I didn’t actually feel like I got that from the film. That felt really subtle.

Tim Hayward
I thought, I mean, perhaps it suffered by being too modern and too subtle about the relationship between the man and the cook. But genuinely, there were a lot of old blokes wandering around using very special, very exclusive language to talk about things in a way that, you know, they were deliberately excluding other people from what it was they were trying to create. But I mean, because that . . . there were men like that doing that thing.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Let’s talk about the relationship that these characters had with the food and with French cuisine. To start, Tim. When we were emailing ahead of this recording, you said that the film underscored the difference between the French and the British and how they relate to food. Can you tell me what you meant by that? Just in terms of the French, especially the French point of view?

Tim Hayward
I suppose it’s the way that they are able to talk about it and take it seriously in a way that we still can’t. The Brits don’t seem to behave that way, and it’s easy to characterise the French as doing that and to laugh at it. And sometimes even in this film, it is truly absurd, some of the things they say. You can’t imagine . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s kind of pretentious.

Tim Hayward
Yeah. You can’t imagine saying something that pretentious in front of somebody you love who you were trying to impress with the dinner. They’d leave. They would leave on the spot and think, you know, they’ll never swipe on you on Tinder again.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I agree, I felt that in the film too, like it was both nice and sort of annoying that these French people were taking food this seriously. I found myself swinging back and forth on it.

Tim Hayward
The director makes the point really well with the little character, Pauline. The little girl? 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, she’s the apprentice in the kitchen.

Tim Hayward
I found her the most interesting of the lot. There’s a scene at the beginning which genuinely chills me to the marrow, where she’s sitting there next to the older man in what — if you’ve watched a lot of French films — looks like one of those things is gonna become very problematic very quickly. And she simply describes what she’s tasting and detecting and he’s drawing it out of her. And I was looking at that and thinking, oh my God, this is tantamount to child abuse. This is absolutely appalling, turning into this little robot. And at the end, the most important key moment is when she’s talking to the Juliette Binoche character and she simply says, yeah, when I had the baked Alaska, I wanted to cry. And that one of those is the artificial, very male, very sort of, I don’t know what to say, sort of anally retentive approach to parsing and codifying food. And at the other end of it, she’s just suddenly reacting to this thing in a truly, truly emotional way, in a different room to the man.

Harriet Fitch Little
We could say that this film is not exactly shy of letting people have emotional reactions to food overall, is it? Before we started recording, we were talking about this line, which I’m so glad also made Tim laugh it just made me, you know, really cringe and shrivel up into myself when he has to start cooking for her. So this relationship of cooking is reversed and he suddenly becomes the cook and he’s bringing her all these meals, there’s little flowers on the things that he’s cooking. But anyway, at a certain point he says to her: “Can I watch you eat?”, which I just thought was disgusting.

Lilah Raptopoulos
We laughed, too. Yeah.

Tim Hayward
But I don’t know. Perhaps that’s the . . . we should dive into that a bit more. It’s not that they’re unemotional about the food, but it is . . . There’s so much language. And it’s like when you, you know, you go and see a painting in a gallery and you don’t want to read the 5,000 words of utter whiffle that go with it. You really just want to stand in front of the damn thing and look at it for a few minutes and see what happens to you.

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Can we talk a little bit about the food that was being cooked? Were there any foods that you liked or disliked seeing cooked? As I was watching him sort of cook this dish for her by . . . what was it? He was boiling the feet of a chicken right before it was fully plucked, and then he was removing, and then he was putting mushrooms in the skin. And I thought, OK, there’s something going on here that I just don’t . . . I just don't . . . 

Tim Hayward
That was poularde demi-deuil — chicken in half mourning. And so the . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, wow. Half mourning. M-O-U-R-N . . . 

Tim Hayward
Half mourning. M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G. So you basically you put your hand inside the carcass, you lift the skin, so you got space inside, and then you pack slices of black truffle over it so it looks like underneath its skin it’s wearing, well effectively a lacy black dress, which would have been the half morning. It’s an absolute classic of French cuisine, along with the omelette. I mean, they pretty much ticked off all the absolute classics that you need to know and want to know about.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Right, right, right. What was it like for you to watch that?

Tim Hayward
I found it wonderful, but I couldn’t watch anybody do that over and over and over again. And I’m always fascinated by . . . I don’t know. I don’t do sport, but I imagine you’d never get tired of watching a golfer hit a ball or another golfer hit a ball. You always have something to say about it. I was more troubled, to be honest, with some of the bits of the filmmaking. I think he really needed to tone down the wildbird track that went through absolutely everything. I thought at one point it was an homage to Hitchcock and there were a thousand feral birds outside the window. He never found that, though. Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It is worth saying there’s no music in this film, and there are a lot of footsteps clicking on tile . . . 

Tim Hayward
Yes, you got the footsteps. It was bonkers, wasn’t it?

Lilah Raptopoulos
. . . almost exclusively. 

Tim Hayward
Mainly I can’t forgive him for cutting between a shot of a peach and Juliette Binoche’s bottom? I judge that thing happened so, so cornball . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
It was a pear. 

Harriet Fitch Little
It’s a pear actually, Tim.

Tim Hayward
It was a pear.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Tim, it was a pear.

Tim Hayward
Maybe I just noticed the bottom. Just forgive me now. (Laughter)

Harriet Fitch Little
Coming back to watching the process of the food being cooked, I grew vegetables, so at the beginning when she’s cutting these vegetables and they’re all really wonky, weird vegetables, I think they must have gone to quite some effort to get vegetables that really looked bad in a way. And I love that. But I often find myself screaming at the end dish the closer it got towards completion and suddenly have these beautiful, fresh ingredients to this incredibly . . . the huge vol-au-vent was the best example of this. You go from these incredible constituent parts to this enormous, you know, towering thing of pastry with this very thick white sauce all over it. It looks naff, you know. It doesn’t look like how you would want to present those ingredients at a time when what we prize in food is basically keeping things as close as possible to their original state.

Tim Hayward
I absolutely agree, and I think that’s part of the codification process, isn’t that? I mean, they’ve, once you’ve discussed whether or not you’re gonna have carrots as an aromatic in your broth, you know once somebody said yes and somebody said that goes well with celery and it goes well with onion, you’re starting to build up a list of things that you simply can’t do without.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
I would love to spend the rest of the conversation talking about like, if this film worked. One thing that our producer Lulu really bristled at was the politics of the film. Some reviews have praised it as radical, partially because it features a woman chef who is clearly respected by her male counterpart, which is a pretty low bar. It didn’t really feel radical to me at all. She mostly stays in the kitchen. It didn’t really allude to a bigger world out there. It did feel very proud to be French in some ways, but I wanted to know what you both felt about that.

Harriet Fitch Little
Well, I think it’s a film that you keep on expecting the tension to emerge, don’t you? And you never get it. To begin with, you sort of keep waiting for the thing that brings some politics into it, and it was clearly a very intentional choice that none of those things happened. But perhaps it would have been a more interesting film if it had.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. So what do you think the movie is about, when you left? Did you feel like it was about grief, it was about gender dynamics, it was about the beauty of food? What did you feel like it was about?

Harriet Fitch Little
I think it’s probably about food as art at the end of the day — the sort of personal and private appreciation of a shared passion. I was trying to think about why I didn’t like the film more, and I think perhaps it does come down to the relationship that you have with food, because this sort of eating that this celebrates is this really cerebral and sensual and the sort of experience that I roll my eyes that when I see people simulating it on Instagram, this sort of like, oh my God, this is the best thing I’ve ever tasted. Wow. And I was trying to think about the food films that I really love. And I think the food film that I love the most is Big Night with Stanley Tucci, which is a ‘90s film about an Italian-American restaurant that’s down on its luck and is essentially trying to put on a big party for some celebrity who’s in town. And the focus of the food . . . it was very much a food-focused film, but it’s basically all about the communal — celebratory, party, bringing people together — aspect of food. And I watched that film and I feel really moved by it, and I feel happy. And because that’s the bit of food that excites me, rather than this sort of more contemplative intellectual relationship. And perhaps people who have that relationship with food, and I do believe they do, I’d imagine those people love this film.

Tim Hayward
I suppose it can’t help because of where and where it’s set and when it’s set. It can’t help but also have this overlay of gender and class. And that makes it a bit difficult. I mean, you really can’t just look at it and not think about, like, who’s the master here? Who’s the servant? You know the incredible line: Are you my cook or my wife? You know that ludicrous position at the end that they’ve managed to talk themselves into. You can’t get round that. It has a kind of, I don’t know, a slightly indecent absorption in the food itself. It actually kind of lacks joy.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Tim, it sounds like you actually have a more complicated relationship with this movie than you first suggested. And I’m wondering, Harriet, if you feel victorious?

Harriet Fitch Little
I feel so relieved. I thought I was gonna have to come in here and say, you know, it’s a very good film. Yes, as food and drink editor, I see the value of this important piece of work. But if I’ve got, you know, Tim’s blessing, you know. (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
And on that I will say thank you both so much. This was so much fun. We will be back in just a moment for More or Less.

[BEHIND THE MONEY TRAILER PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome back for More or Less, the part of the show where each guest shares one thing they want to see more of or less of culturally. Harriet, let’s start with you. What do you have?

Harriet Fitch Little
Well, I almost missed the start of this film because I didn’t realise that films shown at the BFI cinema on the Southbank in London don’t have any ads, and they actually start exactly when they’re meant to on the moment. And I’m not saying that I necessarily want more films with no ads, because I do quite like the ads, but I think more films when you actually know what time they are going to start so that you can plan your evening effectively. That’s my very dull, but maybe quite important more.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s a good point. Sometimes they start before the film is supposed to start too, which no one tells . . . 

Harriet Fitch Little
It’s mayhem.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Tim, what about you?

Tim Hayward
I would like to say that in my general cultural journey of the last couple of months, I would like to see less content.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, yeah.

Tim Hayward
And really just a lot less content. I’m in a phase of PR for a book, and my PRs are trying to get me to put more stuff online, which is horrible. I mean, literally, you’re spending hours a day making idiotic little videos and thrusting them out there. And I’m sort of, I’m being thrust to different friends’ substacks and I’m reading them, bless them, because I like them and they’re my friends and I want to encourage them and it’s all terrific. But you realise that none of this stuff is being edited at all. And so without wishing to overflatter my editor, who’s in the room with me at the moment, we really need some editing. We need a lot less unthought-of content.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, actually, that’s a really good one, Tim. I really agree with you. Harriet, we need an army of you.

I would like fewer radical surprises in the culture that I’m consuming. I watched the show One Day on Netflix. It was a novel that became a movie in 2011, and it’s now been remade as everything’s been remade into a Netflix show. And for a Netflix thing, I actually really liked it. I thought it was great. I thought the actors were good. Every episode is one day a year later, so you kind of watch them through their 20s. And it made me think about my 20s, and I just was really enjoying it. And then at the end, something that I’m not going to spoil but was huge, happened, and it made me hate the whole thing. And I was mad for days.

Harriet Fitch Little
I think lots of people had that reaction about that book or film. Just feeling outraged by what you’ve just described. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Totally. I was totally hoodwinked. I would not have spent all that time. I was really mad. And I don’t want surprises like that. So that’s it. Just like, be nice to your viewers. (Laughter)

Harriet Fitch Little
It’s an important use of your platform with the podcast, Lilah. Telling your creators, unpleasant surprises.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Tim and Harriet, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was really such a delight.

Harriet Fitch Little
Thank you, Lilah.

Tim Hayward
Thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. Take a read through the show notes. We have linked to everything mentioned today, as well as places that you can follow Tim and Harriet. Every link that goes to the FT gets you past the paywall. Also in the show notes is a discount to a subscription to the Financial Times and ways to stay in touch with me on email and Instagram.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely week and we’ll find each other again on Monday.

[MUSIC PLAYING]