Review of the film “Recipe for Love” by Tran Anh Hung

Tran Anh Hung’s Recipe for Love, awarded at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, has reached Russian screens. The intimate plot is dominated by a culinary theme, but both are deceptive. In fact, this is a great film about the most important things – love, death, art, freedom and happiness, I am convinced Andrey Plakhov.

This is all the more valuable because the film does not impose or teach anything. Watching it is the same pure pleasure as dining in a good restaurant or visiting in the company of understanding people. If these people are French, they will not rant about world problems, but they will certainly devote part of the table conversation to food and wine. After all, they form an integral part of the French art de vivre – the art of living, which reached its peak at the end of the 19th century, when the action of “A Recipe for Love” takes place.

At that time there was no fast food and, on the other hand, the perversions of haute cuisine. There were no food bloggers or cooking TV shows. The food was not “biological”, but real, although she didn’t boast about it. In the first third of the film, we feel the captivating naturalness of life on a physical level: with our eyes, ears, and even, it seems, our nose. Fruits and vegetables are brought to the kitchen – to this sanctuary – from the garden, fish and meat are also delivered here, all this, together with sauces, seasonings, and spices, turns into an assortment for the future table. What’s planned for today? Oysters with whipped butter and lemon, rooster consommé, halibut quenelles, vol-au-vent with lobster. Well, that’s the main thing, not counting the cheeses and desserts.

Almost no talking; Meanwhile, the characters intensively communicate through the language of taste sensations and the symbolism of dishes. There is no musical accompaniment at all, only the music of life: we hear birds singing in the garden, and in the kitchen a frying pan hisses, water bubbles, fresh salad crunches under a quick knife. Thus, from the very beginning, the aesthetics of the film are set – as tangibly documentary as poetically sublime.

It is paradoxical that the poet and singer of art de vivre was not a Frenchman at all, but a Vietnamese, the son of a completely different tradition. Tran Anh Hung left his homeland at the age of 12 when Saigon was captured by the Communists. Studied at film school in Paris; his first film, The Scent of Green Papaya, won the Camera d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar. “Rickshaw,” the second film in the “Vietnamese trilogy,” won the Golden Lion in Venice. Looking retrospectively at these films, you now notice how important the smell of a tropical fruit, taken from childhood, is for the director, like Proust’s taste of a madeleine cake melting in linden tea. On how significant the absorption of food is in “Pedicabs,” whose characters eat caterpillars, insects, and live fish.

In the 1990s, Tran Anh Hung was considered a star of the first magnitude in the film world, but then they forgot about him: he no longer filmed in Vietnam, ceased to be perceived as an exotic, and turned into one of many French directors. And only now it became clear that he was ahead of them all, even such “French-French” ones as Claude Chabrol, in comprehending the main national bond.

“Recipe for Love” was originally called “The Passion of Daudin Bouffant”, and in Cannes it was called “Pot-au-feu”. Few people outside France are familiar with the novel “The Life and Passion of the Gourmet Daudin Bouffant,” written by Marcel Ruff exactly one hundred years ago, in 1924. The French dish pot-au-feu is a cross between a stew and a soup with meat and vegetables. Both titles have to be explained to foreigners, so in Canada they preferred to release the film as “The Taste of Things,” and in Russia they called it “Recipe for Love.”

This taste and this recipe are embodied in the lifestyle of a wealthy esthete, a connoisseur of edible masterpieces, in his relationship with the talented cook he hired, capable of preparing the most exquisite dishes and making even the simplest ones exquisite. In addition to professional cooperation, the heroes are connected by a romantic intrigue that has lasted for years. The love-gastronomic story glorifies the art of cooking, the transcendental connection between eroticism and taste sensations, reveals the secret ingredients of love and the subtleties of human communication.

Casting played a key role in the film’s success. Bouffan is played by Benoit Magimel, the cook Eugénie is played by Juliette Binoche. Between the two performers, connected by several years of marriage and a common child, there is an extreme closeness, tenderness, but also the fragility of their union, which was undermined by the painful experience they experienced. Addiction to alcohol and drug addiction almost destroyed Magimel’s successful career, but he managed to overcome himself and triumphantly return to his profession, receiving the Cesar Award, the highest award in French cinema, for two years in a row.

Just as the actor’s romance was not legalized by official marriage, the heroes of “Recipe for Love” also avoid the bonds of marriage. Buffant persuades Eugenie to take this step, but she is adamant. Here you can see a feminist message, but what is more important for Tran Anh Hung and his heroine is the idea of ​​freedom, inseparable from a sense of professional perfection. Towards the end, a young talent named Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoir), endowed with a unique talent for taste, looks into the plot of the film; she will become the heir to a culinary utopia.

“Recipe for Love” is not a retro film, and certainly not a historical film. This is a metaphor for a mythological lost paradise that probably never existed. Therefore, the film does not talk about politics or the events that shook the world at that time in the same way as now. This is not an escape from the reality given in sensations, but the creation of an alternative reality, where love, pleasure, freedom, happiness and even death are compatible.