One of the most purely pleasurable films of the year, Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things secured France’s pick as their Oscar entry over Anatomy of a Fall, which should be no surprise to those who have seen both films. Led by Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel, the culinary drama may go down easy, but there’s an impressive sense of heartbreak and longing to the film, which will next stop by the 61st New York Film Festival before opening from IFC Films. Along with a new trailer, they’ve set an awards-qualifying run in December 2023, then a limited opening on February 9, 2024 and expansion on February 14, 2024.
Rory O’Connor said in his review, “Last time Benoît Magimel appeared in the Cannes competition, a vision in Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, he played a foreign diplomat who stalked an island of French Polynesia like a trashy king. If Serra’s otherworldy film told a cautionary tale about feckless Euro-decadence, Magimel’s latest is more like a revelry. Adapted from Marcel Rouf’s 1924 novel The Passionate Epicure, The Pot-au-Feu is a film about the pleasures of preparing food and consuming it, the idea of cooking as an act of giving and even of love––if a leitmotif exists in this film’s script, it is the sigh of ecstasy.”
See the trailer below.