Every year at the Cannes Film Festival, there is one French film that the entire French industry rallies around, purely just because of how French it is, and the ensuing standing ovation shows this year’s slot certainly goes to Trần Anh Hùng’s The Pot-au-Feu, a translated title somehow just as French as the native La Passion de Dodin Bouffant. The Vietnamese Trần (who’s been working and living in France for three decades) unites two megawatt stars of French cinema, Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel, to make an unapologetic love letter to haute cuisine, certainly a pride of France, and later to love itself.
Magimel plays the titular Dodin, who’s one of the most celebrated chefs in the country, circa 1885. But arguably the real genius behind his recipes is Binoche’s Eugénie, who’s been working by his side and executing his recipes for twenty years. Dodin loves Eugénie, but Eugénie prefers a working partnership and refuses to marry him, so Dodin makes it his mission to win over Eugénie by sheer culinary skill.
However, that premise I just described doesn’t happen until 45 minutes into the movie. The first 45 minutes of the movie are an extended cooking and dinner-serving sequence that overstuffs even the most hardcore of fine dining aficionados. Trần perhaps wants to use the pacing to show the viewer just how laborious and time-consuming fine dining preparation is, but I believe there are more efficient ways to show the passage of time in cinema than literally stretching it out. Under Trần’s sunset lighting and measured steadicam, Binoche and Magimel perform some of the most skilled and tender cooking ever captured in cinematic history, and this celebration of craftsmanship and art serves perfectly well as an anti-The Menu, last year’s horribly overrated anti-art thriller. But as Dodin and Eugénie transfer a chicken from pot to pot for the fourth time, there is a feeling that this overwhelming sequence lacks soul or, quite literally, character.
Because all of the masters of food in cinema—Ozu in The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, Kore-eda in Still Walking, Ang Lee in Eat Drink Man Woman, etc.—understand that it is character that gives their food life. In the first 45 minutes of The Pot-au-Feu, no matter how elaborate and sumptuous the cooking on screen is, Dodin and Eugénie are cooking for rich white male guests we know little about. Not only after this glorified prologue does Dodin finally cook with a purpose, and that delay has spoiled the film quite irrevocably.
And it is not until another plot point at around two-thirds of the film that the film really transcends to the level of mastery it has so diligently been aiming to capture. Dodin’s arc from this point onwards is so subtle, controlled, and natural yet so powerful that it puts every movie “about grief” nowadays to shame. It is Hollywood screenwriting of a classical character arc at its most unforced and thus most believable, with histrionics that arrive at just the right amount and never to be seen again. There is no need to oversell the drama because Trần trusts his material and his audiences.
Trần is known for his poeticism, and decades after making his name with The Scent of Green Papaya (this man and his gastronomical titles!), he retains his languorous gaze, now timeless. The cinematography often prefers to live in underexposed shadows and relaxed yet precise Steadicam and dolly moves. Dodin’s first proposal by a moonlit river is perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing sequence I’ve seen so far at Cannes. And despite the prettiness of Trần’s style, he understands that prettiness is often not enough, as he maximizes his patient style for a stunning and slightly brain-breaking yet somehow also simplistic reveal in the final shot.
Binoche and Magimel are acting royalty in France (if not worldwide), and here they prove why. Both must have trained for months under the film’s culinary advisor (and one of France’s most celebrated chefs) Pierre Gagnaire, yet there is not a scent of robotic artifice in their execution of such complex choreography. Even more amazing is how Binoche injects so much life in a simple line-reading that instantly enlivens her character, and how Magimel uses his physique to contrast Dodin’s vulnerability and softheartedness. They are the essence of movie star acting: it is precisely because they look exactly the same as they always do that you see and believe their subtleties as these characters. Magimel is large in presence yet smooth like pudding; Binoche is large in presence and even larger in absence.
Yet, despite all these delights, Trần has struggled to capture the artistry of superb fine dining, as ironically explained in the film: that every course has to feel purposeful and never indulgent. In spoiling the audience with such drawn-out cooking sequences, Trần makes a pretty feast only for the eyes. The film realizes its errors and rectifies to a dessert course most unforgettably delicious, but it is a tad too late for this viewer; perhaps the film needs the trimmings of a prix fixe menu.