(New York) On tour in New York, filmmaker Tran Anh Hung and star chef Pierre Gagnaire extol French “culinary art” in their Oscar-shortlisted film The Passion of Dodin Bouffant, an aesthetic work criticized in France but who wants to promote “French culture” internationally.
Winner of the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the feature film pays “tribute to my country which welcomed me when I was 12 years old”, declared in an interview with AFP Tran Anh Hung, a refugee in France in 1975 after the Vietnam War.
The feature film by this Frenchman of Vietnamese origin, famous for The Smell of Green Papaya and Cyclo, was released in France at the beginning of November and features a duo from the end of the 19th century between the gastronome Dodin, played by Benoît Magimel , and the cook Eugénie, played by Juliette Binoche, united by a romantic and culinary complicity.
Under its American title The Taste of Things, the film will be released in the United States on February 14, 2024, one month before the Oscars where it is pre-selected in the best international film category.
It was presented Tuesday evening in New York by the Villa Albertine, the cultural arm of French diplomacy.
A teenager “amazed” by “French culture”, the 60-year-old filmmaker said that he had been looking for “20 years for a subject on cooking” and that he wanted to “make a film about an art” which “awakens a poetry which deeply touches” the viewer.
With this very aesthetic work, the artist also wanted to salute the “French spirit”.
“I chose culinary art, not painting, not music,” he explained to AFP about this adaptation of a 1920 Swiss novel by Marcel Rouff.
The international star chef, Pierre Gagnaire, 73, was the culinary advisor. Three stars in the Michelin Guide (“Hôtel Balzac” in Paris), the restaurateur has other establishments in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, London, Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai and Dubai. He is present in a chic New York brasserie and appears on French television in the show Top Chef.
On screen, the feature film gives pride of place to the preparation of gargantuan feasts.
“In the kitchens, we build things and we defend our culture,” Pierre Gagnaire, who came with Tran Anh Hung to promote their film in the United States, told AFP before the selection and nomination stages in December and January for the Oscars ceremony on March 10, 2024, in Los Angeles.
At the restaurant, “we don’t just sell taste, we sell […] everything that revolves around tableware and it’s also a way of defending our know-how,” insisted the man who had started his career at his home in Saint-Étienne.
The Passion of Dodin Bouffant was pre-selected in September to represent France at the Oscars in a list of five French feature films, including the most recent Palme d’Or at Cannes, Anatomy of a Fall by Justine Triet.
This director took advantage of the Cannes scene to criticize the French government’s policy on culture and pensions.
And despite some laudatory reviews in France, “Dodin Bouffant” was described by the newspaper Le Monde as an “indigestible Pot-au-feu”, an “out of the ordinary, out of date, almost sickening” film by Le Parisien and “a bombastic celebration of the myth of French gastronomy, where food porn meets rancid conservatism,” according to the magazine Les Inrockuptibles.
To “those who criticize the film,” Pierre Gagnaire responded Tuesday evening, scathingly, that “it’s the slowness that makes it beautiful.”
“Today, we are a bit in the “quickly done well” whereas it takes time” cinema and cooking, says the chef.
