Hulu
AMC+Set in 1889 France, Dodin Bouffant is a chef living with his personal cook and lover Eugénie. They share a long history of gastronomy and love but Eugénie refuses to marry Dodin, so the food lover decides to do something he has never done before: cook for her.
But what The Taste of Things lacks, especially compared to those titles, is a gratifying emotional arc to accompany its gastronomic spectacle.The Taste of Things operates in a low key, and building dramatic stakes does not seem to be Hùng’s motivating aim. Rather, he tries to express the unique rapture of being fed by someone you love, who knows your tastes as well as you yourself do. The issue, then, arises with Hùng’s miscalibration of the film’s competing elements. His sensualism fares better with food than with his characters.
The Taste of Things skirts prestige-picture self-parody. In truth, it wouldn’t take much to push it over the proverbial edge. But even as its characters exist at a remove from a larger and more stratified reality, they’re hardly insulated from tragedy, and while Tran telegraphs the material’s late turn into melodrama, he handles the actual fallout with admirable restraint.
