In Review: 'The Taste of Things,' 'Lisa Frankenstein'

At the arthouse this week, a hearty meal. At the multiplex, thin gruel.

The Taste of Things
Dir. Tran Anh Hung
134 min.

The entire first 35 minutes of Tran Anh Hung’s exquisite The Taste of Things is given over to the preparation of a meal, one of the many hosted by Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), a late 19th century French gourmand who’s renowned as the “Napoleon of gastronomy.” Dodin slips in and out of the kitchen at his estate, but the actual cooking is done by Eúgenie (Juliette Binoche), his chef for 20 years and his live-in companion, though the two remain unmarried. The dishes are all complex and delectable—many great movies of its kind have come before, but this is three-star Michelin food porn—but the ease with which Eúgenie moves through this space is a pleasure in its own right. She’s like a dancer who knows the choreography by rote, but still acts on instinct, subtly improvising moves on the fly. It’s a true joy to witness.

It’s also something of a directorial high-wire act for Tran, the French-Vietnamese filmmaker whose keen regard to sensual pleasure was evident from his very first film, 1993’s The Scent of Green Papaya. (And who can forget the morning routines of Tran’s 2000 film The Vertical Ray of the Sun, set to tracks like The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes”?) Working with cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg—whose photography on Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV was like a Rembrandt painting where you could watch the brushstrokes—Tran complements Eúgenie’s deftness in the kitchen by gliding around unobtrusively, picking up details in the plating and in the management of period-specific cookware and appliances. Between The Taste of Things and Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros, home chefs can enjoy a productive day in culinary school.

After the meal is enjoyed and the plates cleared, The Taste of Things sinks deeper into the personal dynamic between Dodin and Eúgenie, via another gorgeous scene out by a pond where the camera seems to sway and swoon between them. They love each other and love what they do together. That’s clear enough.They discuss the potential of a prodigious young girl who’s looking for mentorship, which would be unthinkable if she didn’t have a palate so uncommonly sophisticated for someone her age. They also talk about the state of their relationship. Eúgenie has batted away many marriage proposals, because she values her freedom and is happy with the status quo. But Dodin’s persistence is starting to chip away at her defenses.

Life intervenes with their plans, to put it as vaguely as possible, and The Taste of Things ends up evolving into a film about the preciousness of ephemeral moments and memories, which of course also describes a great meal. The film’s title at Cannes, where it won Tran a deserving Best Director prize, was The Pot-au-Feu, the name of a traditional dish of boiled meat and vegetables that Dodin dreams of reinventing, sparked by the ordeal of a dinner menu so absurdly ostentatious that it took over eight hours to consume it. He longs for simplicity and grace, a refinement of touch that the film and the two lead performances seem to embody so effortlessly. It’s a gastronome’s delight to witness Tran and his collaborators make a complicated dish look so easy. It’s a romantic’s delight, too. — Scott Tobias

The Taste of Things opens in limited release tomorrow.

Lisa Frankenstein
Dir. Zelda Williams
101 min.

Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton) hasn’t been the same since her mom was murdered by a masked killer, forcing her to move to a new home in a new town complete with a wicked stepmother named Janet (Carla Gugino) and an actually kind of new stepsister named Taffy (Liza Soberano). She feels isolated at school and doesn’t have much interest in her classmates, except maybe Michael (Henry Eikenberry), the dreamy editor of the literary magazine. She doesn’t talk much, except sometimes to the residents of the crumbling cemetery behind her new house. It’s 1989, and while the rest of her family is dying to go see Look Who’s Talking, she’d rather stay at home and listen to Galaxie 500. But when Lisa accidentally drinks some odd concoction at a party she’s dragged to and an errant bolt of lighting hits her favorite tombstone, she picks up an unexpected companion in the form of an unnamed corpse (Cole Sprouse) whose long-ago death doesn’t mean he’s stopped having feelings.

Scripted by Diablo Cody, this first feature from Zelda Williams is set in the ‘80s and sometimes plays like a product of that decade in which hapless protagonists found unexpected love in the form of mermaids, mannequins, and starmen (when not switching bodies with their parents, of course). But that premise ultimately serves as a jumping off point for a horror comedy that plays like an E.C. Comics version of Heathers only, unfortunately, without much of the appeal of either. The film begins well enough, but once the fun of seeing crimped hair combined with some memorable Cody one-liners wears off, the film—well, apologies for bringing in the obvious metaphor—flatlines.

Which isn’t to say it’s not memorably weird or that the story doesn’t go to some unexpected (and gory) places. It’s simply too odd a film to dismiss and the cast, Newton especially, is quite charming. But there’s a fundamental sluggishness and murkiness of purpose that Lisa Frankenstein can never quite overcome, even once the corpses start piling up. The last time Cody scripted a horror comedy, the result was Jennifer’s Body, a critical and commercial dud that’s been reclaimed as a minor classic. It’s easy to see why, too. It’s an imperfect film but possesses an energy and a thematic clarity Lisa Frankenstein never finds. This one? It’s alive but it’s not lively. —Keith Phipps

Lisa Frankenstein opens everywhere tomorrow.