Examiner par robert-temple

It is rare that one sees a film with the same sense of awe and pleasure as one experiences looking at a great painting in a museum where one can linger and examine the brush-strokes without people in the way. This film by the French/Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung is such a film. It is a 'must' for anyone of gastronomical inclinations, anyone training to be a chef, any true 'foodies', and experts on traditional French cooking. But it is also a film with stories, with happiness and with sadness. The film is set in the 1890s or first years of the 20th century, in provincial France. It seems to have been filmed entirely on location and the interiors take place in a traditional manor house. There is no electricity, and light is all from sunlight, candles, and oil lamps. There are no phones or other interruptions to the tranquillity of the setting. The cinematography is exceptional, with rich natural colour and ingenious camerawork (congratulations to the camera operator!) There is no sense of the existence of the outside world, and no one travels outside the bubble of their existence. The house is that of a famous gourmet, Monsieur Dodin, played quietly and magnetically by Benoît Magimel. For twenty years his cook Eugénie has lived with him and together they have created some of the greatest dishes of France on a daily basis, and invented several classic dishes as well. She is played by Juliette Binoche as a quiet, understated, and proud woman. Magimel has been in love with her and asking her to marry him for all that time, but she refuses to marry, even though they are lovers, because she prefers things the way they are. She does not really want to become a wife. She and Magimel have in a sense grown together into one person, and can communicate perfectly well in silence with an occasional glance or remark, or even a sound of approval or disapproval over a dish. Sometimes 'Mmmmm' is enough to convey paragraphs' worth of meaning. They discover a very young girl named Pauline who is a born gastronomic genius, and she enters their circle. She is played to perfection by Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire, who is also naturally able to communicate by silence and with her eyes. Everything about this slow and dreamy film is magical. But best of all is the endless demonstrations of preparations of complex dishes. And when making a pot au feu, for instance, Magimel does not extract separate garlic cloves, but cuts the garlic boldly in half and places those carefully with cut-side up down into the pot. Magimel has a circle of five friends who are also gastronomes, and they frequently come for special dinners. They exchange stories about food. One refers to an incident which took place in 1364 with Pope Urban V at Avignon. To the group, this might as well have been yesterday, because as gastronomy is eternal, food and wine tales are also ageless. At one point Magimel and Binoche drink a bottle of 1839 champagne; it had been shipwrecked and lay at the bottom of the sea for 50 years, but when recovered in 1887, Magimel had bought three bottles of it at auction. They drink the most splendid wines every day, and at one point Magimel is drinking Chambolle-Musigny and says it is his favourite burgundy. As for whites, there is for instance the best of the Puligny-Montrachets. (A bottle of the 2021 is for sale on the internet at the moment for £747.60 in case you are interested.) There is an amazing scene where the men are together and eating ortolans, with napkins entirely covering their heads. Ortolans are small rare birds, said to be the finest of all game birds. When President Pompidou lay dying he had his last meal, at his special request, of ortolans. I have never eaten one and don't feel comfortable about eating rare creatures. Ormeaux yes, ortolans no, because they now farm ormeaux on the coast of Britanny, so that is OK then. In Magimel's kitchen all the pans are copper, and there is even a special copper 'turbot pan' shaped like a turbot, and large enough to hold one. We see the turbot dish being prepared. The stove is a large black aga. The kitchen is large and there are plenty of surfaces. The garden supplies endless vegetables. The film is amongst other things a continuous stream of demonstrated recipes, showing every aspect of the chopping and preparation of every ingredient. We see it all so clearly that if we had the ingredients and time and patience we could recreate some of them just from what we have seen and heard in the film. At one point we see every stage of the preparation of a Baked Alaska; the subtitles say 'Baked Alaska' but in the French dialogue they do not say Alaska, they say 'Norwegian'. (Alaska means nothing to the French even now.) The home made ice cream is made in a sunken area full of chopped ice. We are treated to the information that the vol-au-vent was discovered by accident. The group then decides that the story may be apocryphal, but that they don't care because they love any story about food whether it is true or false. All of these people are able to concentrate so profoundly upon food and cooking because there are no distractions, life is quiet, and nothing need interrupt the preparation of even the most complicated dish. It does not matter if a dish takes hours to prepare, as the dish is more important than time. This film is a food-lover's dream. I have not discussed the personal dramas that take place because it is difficult to do so without spoilers. What a triumph and work of art this film is! It can teach you to savour food, love cooking, and above all, eating.