“Recipe for Love”: gastronomic drama of a French-Vietnamese classic
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The winner of the Cannes award for best director, “Recipe for Love,” which has been tested and celebrated by critics, but has not yet been fully appreciated by the mass audience, is being released in Russia. In the slow and deceptively simple gastronomic drama prepared by the hands and heart of the modern French-Vietnamese classic Tran Anh Hung, you want to see a grandiose declaration of love for the process of life as such.
1880s France, the Third Republic is in full swing. But landowner-gourmet Daudin Bouffan (not very recognizable Benoit Magimel), entering the autumn of his life, has no time for politics. He has one passion – cooking. More precisely, two: cooking and Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), the woman who has been running his kitchen for many years. It is she who is the Napoleon of French cuisine, as Daudin is breathily called by food lovers, who can entrust any dish from his menu, it is she who manages the vegetable garden, has heart-to-heart conversations with carrots, hugs lettuce and prepares regular dinners for Daudin and his bottomless bourgeois friends. This is the only person with whom a discussion of either flounder (aka turbot) or “Norwegian omelette” (do not confuse this dessert with an actual omelette) is filled with the same high meaning that is usually inherent in the discussions of astronomers about celestial bodies, and of poets about their spent fees. . Doden sincerely (and quite rightly) believes that the discovery of a new dish will make humanity happy sooner than the discovery of a new star, and a recipe book, of course, is more reliable than a collection of poetry.
Eugenie and Dodin have been together for a long time, but are still not married. Their love, like good wine, matures so successfully that marriage – a kind of uncorking of a cork – is seen as an important, but rather sad event. Not as a stage, but as a result. “Recipe for Love” is a film about process. The first half hour is spent between the vegetable garden and the spacious kitchen, in which they boil, steam, chill, fry, bake, marinate, season, stir, turn and fry again, and then taste, taste, taste. This is what is called an overture, an episode through which the viewer enters the film in order to then, completely exhausted from the surging feelings, surrender to its mercy, just as a crayfish submits to fate when it is dipped into boiling water.
It is categorically not recommended to go hungry to see this film, but you can be especially happy for the people who took part in the filming process. The food on site was obviously fine. According to the author of “Recipe for Love”, for potofe alone, which appears in the original title – a culinary genius struggles over this seemingly simple dish in the final part of the film – about forty kilograms of beef were spent, which, of course, were consumed with gusto during filming eaten.
The modern civilization of food bloggers, tirelessly cooking in front of the camera, in general, it seems, should be happy. Tran Anh Hung, who once won the Camera d’Or for best debut at Cannes with his “The Scent of Green Papaya”, is a great specialist in demonstrating the unhurried flow of life, and with his deceptively quiet, contemplative, seemingly eventless new work, he is not exactly justifies gluttony or panders to the morals of modern epicureans who beautifully photograph what sizzles and foams in their kitchens. But he is in dialogue with them. The latest food fetishist is clearly dearer to the author than the heroes who command life and death.
However, it seems that it’s not just about the food, which has often turned into an ideal show on the silver screen before, although there is little that can compete with “Recipe for Love” in presentation. And not in the special view of this food that is inherent in the French classic director, who fled Vietnam with his parents as a child. And in the calm insistence with which the author explains the basics of the universe to the modern viewer. Chan Anh Hung talks about how complex and divine in their simplicity are the most seemingly banal things. A good piece of meat is obviously more sophisticated than any other constitution, and growing vegetables is a more complicated process than big politics. A talented cook, of course, can rule the state, but she has more important things to do. And the quality of the state and society itself is measured by the ability to produce talented cooks. In this sense, the line of the young Pauline, who has found her way to the kitchen, in whom Eugenie and Dodin recognize a culinary gift, is of great importance for understanding the film.
The kitchen is generally not a random place: the process of cooking is a metaphor for the creation of the world. “God created water, and man created wine,” says one of Doden’s friends, and in this seemingly ordinary polite chatter over a good dinner one can hear something like a life credo, sincere admiration for the creative imagination and tirelessness of man. “Recipe for Love” is not a hymn to consumption, which cooking shows worship, but to creation. The worst thing in “Recipe for Love” happens when the characters leave the stove. Yes, life outside the kitchen can be unfair, for each person it has its own merciless seasonings, a recipe that is unknown to the person himself. But Chan Anh Hung is generally optimistic – and therefore, in the finale, he fearlessly kicks his hero out into the street. And he, it seems, doesn’t mind cooking here some more. The chef, after all, knows better.
In theaters from February 14
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