A Constant Visual Feast

“Juliette Binoche, one of the big screen’s reigning queens, will walk into a movie and not simply “act.” Instead, she will simply “be.” This relaxes the central challenge of her role in The Taste of Things, the new film from French Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hùng—but only slightly. Cooking haute cuisine in a period setting, with methods that comprise the heart of French culinary tradition even today, using tools largely outmoded by the passage of time, is no breezy feat, even for an actress of Binoche’s standing, or a cook of her veterancy. Binoche is Parisian. It’s a given that she knows her way around a stove. But The Taste of Things—in theaters now—requires her to know her way around an entire kitchen, and that’s another skill test entirely.” (Full interview at JoySauce.)