General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

The Taste of Things

The Taste of Things (French: La Passion de Dodin Bouffant) is a 2023 French period romantic drama directed by Trần Anh Hùng, in which a celebrated gourmet and the cook who has worked beside him for twenty years build a life around the preparation and eating of food.¹ Juliette Binoche plays Eugénie, the peerless cook, and Benoît Magimel plays Dodin Bouffant, the gastronome she serves and loves; the film premiered in competition at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Best Director prize, and it was chosen as France's entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the 96th Academy Awards.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title / release	La Passion de Dodin Bouffant; French theatrical release 8 November 2023, distributed by Gaumont²^•⁴
Director and leads	Trần Anh Hùng; Juliette Binoche (Eugénie) and Benoît Magimel (Dodin Bouffant)¹
Cannes 2023	Best Director (Prix de la mise en scène) at the 76th Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered in competition under the title The Pot-au-feu²^•⁵
Source	Loosely based on Marcel Rouff's novel La Vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, gourmet (English title The Passionate Epicure); sources date the novel to 1920 and 1924⁶^•³
Running time	135 minutes per the CNC visa record; Unifrance lists 2 h 14 min and Cineuropa 134'⁴^•¹^•⁷
Opening sequence	A cooking sequence of roughly 40 minutes, filmed as long takes with kitchen sounds standing in for music⁸^•⁹
Oscars	France's submission for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards; it reached the official shortlist but was not nominated³^•¹⁰
Reception	Metascore 85 ("Universal Acclaim") and a 97% Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes¹¹^•¹²

Spoilers

Plot and characters

The film is set in late nineteenth-century France on the grounds of a château in Anjou, in the household of Dodin Bouffant, a renowned gourmet whom characters call the "Napoleon of culinary arts", a comparison he resists.¹³^•¹⁴ Sources date the setting variously to 1885 and 1889.¹⁵^•¹⁶

Eugénie has been Dodin's cook for twenty years, and over that time a love affair has grown between them, tied closely to their shared work: he conceives menus, she executes them, and their union produces dishes that astonish even the world's most illustrious chefs.¹⁷^•⁷ The one barrier between them is marriage: Dodin proposes and Eugénie, attached to her freedom, refuses.¹⁸^•¹⁷ In response he does something he has never done before: he cooks for her, preparing a meal intended to persuade her to marry him.¹⁷ As the film progresses it also becomes a story of illness and grief, centered on Eugénie's declining health.¹⁹^•¹⁴

The household around the couple includes Violette, Dodin's all-round assistant, her niece Pauline, a young girl with a precocious palate who serves as the audience's surrogate in the early scenes, and a circle of gourmets, men who dine regularly at Dodin's table.²⁰^•²¹^•¹⁴

The opening sequence and style

The film opens with an extended, nearly wordless cooking sequence, running about 40 minutes by AP's count and described elsewhere as lasting 38 minutes or roughly half an hour, in which Eugénie and her two young assistants prepare a multi-course meal, from harvesting vegetables and searing fish organs to poaching quenelles and finishing a baked Alaska.⁸^•¹⁴^•²² Sound is sparse: milk pouring, a whisk against a pan, birdsong. Hùng has said he wanted the kitchen scenes to be musical rather than rhythmic, using long takes to convey the harmony among people who have worked together for years, so that the film's "music" comes from the sounds of cooking itself, boiling water, crackling fire, and chopped vegetables, rather than from an instrument.²³^•⁹

Cinematography. Jonathan Ricquebourg, a fellow alumnus of the Louis-Lumière school whom Hùng chose in part because he resembled the director at that age, shot the film, winning the Lumière Award for Best Cinematography.²⁴^•¹⁰ Critics describe the kitchen scenes as bathed in natural light compared to Rembrandt, with the camera gliding among the cooks and rising over the rim of a pot.²⁵^•²⁶

Production

Hùng, a French director of Vietnamese origin who moved to France at age twelve, had long wanted to make a film about the culinary arts and said he rejected the television approach of simply dressing up plates; he wanted to show men and women at work transforming raw ingredients.⁹^•²⁴ The film was shot in a château in Anjou, a location found on the second day of scouting, and produced by Olivier Delbosc for Curiosa Films with Gaumont and France 2 Cinéma.²⁷^•²

The food was real. The three-star chef Pierre Gagnaire designed the dishes, which were cooked on set by Michel Nave, and nothing was artificially enhanced to look better; for the final meal, the triumphant pot-au-feu, some 90 pounds (40 kilograms) of meat were used, and the cast and crew ate everything that was made.³^•⁸ Because retook scenes required fresh ingredients, the production consumed considerable quantities of food.²²

Binoche and Magimel were themselves a couple about twenty years earlier and share a child, a history that reviews say informs the lived-in quality of their performances.⁸^•²⁸

Literary source

The film draws on La Vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, gourmet by Marcel Rouff, a novelist and noted gourmet; Le Monde gives the publication year as 1920, while AP gives 1924 and calls the film "a sort of prequel" to the novel, which was itself loosely inspired by the nineteenth-century French epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.⁶^•³ Rouff's novel was reworked in the twenty-first century into a successful graphic novel.²⁹ A line the film gives Dodin, "The discovery of a new dish brings more joy to humanity than the discovery of a new star", captures the character's creed.³⁰

Reception and awards

At Cannes 2023 the film competed for the Palme d'Or, which went to Anatomy of a Fall, while Hùng took the Best Director prize.²¹ France selected it over Anatomy of a Fall as its Oscar entry for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards; it reached the official shortlist but failed to earn a nomination.³^•¹⁰ French critics responded warmly, with the film gathering César nominations alongside its Lumière Award for cinematography.¹⁰

Critics placed the film in the "gastro-film" lineage alongside Babette's Feast (1987), Tampopo (1985), Like Water for Chocolate (1992), and Big Night (1996).²¹^•¹⁴ Metacritic recorded a Metascore of 85, "Universal Acclaim", with 40 of 43 reviews positive, and Rotten Tomatoes a 97% Tomatometer from 197 reviews.¹¹^•¹² Reception was not uniformly warm: Le Monde's reviewer found the film perplexing and, at times, boring, and a Le Monde retrospective grouped it with Vatel as a Cannes-selected gastronomy epic marked by heaviness.⁶^•³¹

In the United States, IFC Films released the film theatrically, with an awards-qualifying run in Los Angeles and New York in December 2023 before a wide release in February 2024; it later streamed on Hulu, AMC+, and Sundance Now.¹⁴^•³²

Place in Hùng's career

The Taste of Things is Hùng's eighth feature and continues concerns from his earlier work. His debut, The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), was Oscar-nominated and amplified the sensory details of domestic life, a quality he extends here, and critics link the film's theme of what happens when there is no one to receive what we want to give to both The Scent of Green Papaya and Norwegian Wood (2010).¹⁰^•³³^•¹⁹ Since 2016's Éternité his films have turned toward France, and he described this one as an attempt, in his words, "modestly to reflect the French spirit", an homage to his adopted country.⁹^•²⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026