Tag: food

Our dirty questions to Trần Anh Hùng

Posted on by Paul Risker

Vietnamese-born French filmmaker Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things, aka The Pot-au-Feu, is a simple story about gastronomy, based on Marcel Rouff’s novel.

Set in 1885, the unrivalled cook Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) has worked for the famous gourmet chef Dodin (Benoît Magimel) for the last twenty-years. Their relationship has transitioned into a romance, but Eugénie values her freedom and refuses to marry Dodin. Their love and his desire to possess her sees the pair create dishes that are unrivalled, exceeding the expectations of even the world’s most respected chefs. Now, Dodin decides to do something he has never done before – cook for Eugénie.

Born in Da Nang, South Vietnam, Hùng has lived in France since 1975, where he studied filmmaking at Paris’, L’École Nationale Louis Lumière. He made his directorial feature debut with The Scent of Green Papaya (1992), a story of a wealthy family’s gradual decline. For his sophomore feature Cyclo (1995), he delved into Ho Chi Minh City’s underworld, which was followed by The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000), a gentle story about three sisters living in Hanoi. Hung has directed the English language thriller, I Come with the Rain (2009), and a Japanese language adaptation of celebrated author, Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. In 2016, he directed his first French-language film, Eternity, an adaptation of Alice Ferney’s novel The Elegance of Widows.

In conversation with DMovies, Hùng discussed his love of hidden structures in his films, how he turns his audience into the film’s writer, and a lot more!

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Paul Risker – What appeals to you about filmmaking as a means of creative expression?

Trần Anh Hùng – In the process of making a movie there are certain moments that are important. The first is when you choose a project, and if it at least sets you a challenge, then it should be something interesting. When I say challenge, it’s always about how to work with the language of cinema to make something special, that has meaning and emotions. If you work well with the language of cinema, then the emotions will be deeper than a simple illustration of a story, even if the story is quite moving. When you express something that only cinema can do, you touch the audience in a different way.

PR – Are your films less about story and more about emotion and the sensory experience?

TAH – Oh yes, the story isn’t that important. You need to have a story, but it can be very simple. What was more important was the feeling of life and humanity that’s in this movie – how do you create the space to express the value of being alive? This was the most important thing, not an exciting story. This is not interesting to me.

PR – Looking back over your films, can you see how your use of the cinematic language has changed?

TAH – No, I never analyse my films in this way, but I can find similarities between the movies and it’s around the ideas that’s important. For instance, the idea of making a movie that has a musical quality. It has nothing to do with the music I use, it’s more about the film feeling like a piece of music.

The other thing is what I call structure, that’s something related to scriptwriting. Of course, you have the story that could be simple or very complicated, and you have a theme. The most important thing is having a structure that deals with the theme and the story. This structure then creates emotions and meanings in a way that’s less obvious and a little bit more hidden.

In this movie, The Taste of Things, you have the character of Beaubois, the little girl. She appears at the beginning, and she handles the theme of the transmission of knowledge – of cooking. Then she disappears from the movie, and she only reappears at the end. She always represents the idea of transmission but because of the structure she means something else. She’s the one who is going to save Dodin from his depression because of Eugénie’s promise to train her.

This structure also says something else that’s hidden – somehow before dying, Eugenie managed to give Dodin a daughter. So, all of this has a beautiful meaning, and this is what I call structure.

PR – We think of structure as the narrative framework, and often themes and ideas as being separate. Are you repositioning the traditional way we think about structure into interlocking layers?

TAH – I always want to make a structure that’s hidden, so the audience has to formulate a way to find the right words to talk about it. Somehow, I turn the audience into a writer because they have to write down the story they’ve just watched. This is important to me because words are the reality of our lives.

If we don’t put an experience into words, then it’s not completely real. We need to give words to what we experience. Watching a movie is an experience and so you have to find the right words for yourself to express it. I always want to have this hidden structure that allows or forces the audience to put everything into words.

PR – The characters in the film are trying to find the words to communicate and understand one another, and the audience also have to find the words to understand the film. This lends the film an intimate playfulness, where the characters and the audience mirror one another.

TAH – The words in this movie, how they talk to and look at each other, leaving space for the other to be free to express what they need, reflects their humanity. It’s quite beautiful.

For instance, in one scene after a meal we would normally see a conversation between Dodin and Eugénie where he’d tell her what the dinner was about. I prefer her to have this conversation with their four friends. We can see how they talk to each other and how respectful these men are to Eugénie, that it created a rare kind of beauty.

PR – Returning to your point about musical rhythm, diegetic sounds alongside the way characters move and talk creates its own rhythm. By removing the music, it allows these sounds and movement to create a natural and hypnotic rhythm that draws the audience in.

TAH – You’re right, because most of the time when people use music in film, it’s to tell the audience how to react to the scene. I like using music in film, but only when the emotions are already there, and the music is used to confirm it. Somehow, there’s a dialogue between the audience and the music that says, ‘You and I agree this is moving and beautiful.’ The music is the beauty of what’s inside the audience’s soul – this is the role of music for me.

On this movie, I found if you work well with the actors, you ask them to create the right rhythm in terms of the dialogue and the silence between the lines. I asked them to slow everything down and to not play too much, but to trust that the meaning is already in the lines. What they had to take care of was the flavour of the sound they’re making. They had to taste the line in their mouth, then wait a little bit before they give it to the audience. So, there was this sense of the audience hanging on, waiting for the line, and they appreciate it more because of the silence that came before.

All of this was quite precisely done. With all the sounds in the kitchen and in nature, I thought the music could be a little artificial in this case. I needed to let everything be real in terms of the sound, so no sound effects, nothing. Only real sounds that I chose carefully to ensure the right flavour was mixed with the picture.

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Trần Anh Hùng is pictured at the top of this article. The other two images are stills of The Taste of Things.

The Taste of Things opens in US, UK and Eire cinemas on Wednesday, February 14th, courtesy of IFC Films in the US, and Picturehouse Entertainment in the UK and Eire.

In The Morning Of La Petite Mort

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

This opens with a shot of a painting depicting a pig, a fire, an orgasmically ecstatic, scantily clad woman and more, elements which play a part in what follows.

In a smart, up-market apartment, a beautiful young prostitute (Wang Yun-zhi) meditates. Then she services her clients (shown to a soft-core degree of explicit detail). She gets the job done, but the men she services don’t seem to understand that sex is about two people, not just one person (them), so she endures it as a not especially enjoyable job rather than takes pleasure in it. She has a little grille in her door so she can see who’s there before she opens it.

Meanwhile, a young man (Yusuke Fukichi) rides a scooter through the streets, arrives at the building in the pouring rain, walks along the corridor. He’s delivering food to her apartment. His job done, he returns to his home. Home is a loose term; he’s technically homeless: he occupies a room in an abandoned section of a building with no fixtures and fittings, a basic, concrete shell. Some of the window panes are missing and the polythene sheeting covering them is attached, but torn in a few places and blowing uselessly in the high wind. He sleeps in a makeshift bed made from cardboard boxes.

The above two sequences are intercut, so that the footage constantly moves from one life to the other. The festival catalogue compared this to the films of both Wong Kar-wai and Kim Ki-duk. The former you could make a case for, but where Wong’s international crossover success Chungking Express (1994) revitalised cinema in both Hong Kong and beyond, the same can’t be said of the current film: its subject matter feels like we’ve seen it before. Both films, it’s true, deal with urban lives bumping in to one another, but Wong’s film was a game changer in a way that Wang’s current one is not. The Kim Ki-duk comparison is more apt, so we’ll return to that in due course.

In true, clichéd, tart-with-a-heart fashion, the whore opens her door and her heart to the delivery boy. They have sex and she enjoys it, the first time we’ve seen her take such enjoyment. During and after coitus, he is smitten with what can only be described as grief, first silently and then sobbing out loud. In a long, static and post-coital shot, she first (to my inevitably male gaze) tenderly touches and holds his hand, then enfolds him in her arms. (It would be interesting to see what a female writer would have made of this film: likely as not, she would have come down on it like a ton of bricks.)

As he’s leaving, they negotiate a deal down to 15 from 20 takeaways as the price for the evening. So he comes back, merely to deliver food, another 15 times. (This too recalls Chungking Express, with its narrative of stockpiling out-of-date cans of tinned fruit day by day only to later binge eat them all in one go.) Then, one day he comes back to find a real estate agent showing a well-heeled couple round the cleared apartment.

Before that though, on the back of the first night, the delivery boy takes the prostitute out for a romantic evening at a restaurant and they both have a really good time, with no attached obligation for coitus. He confesses to her his dream of starting his own food stall, and when he’s subsequently got it going, she comes down to visit him. On a later occasion still, she discovers that she is pregnant. And vanishes from the narrative.

Meanwhile, the delivery boy has been slowly finding the occasional piece of furniture for his makeshift home, transporting a cupboard from a building’s rubbish deposit point on his bike then up the stairs by hand to where he’s living. Here he runs into a lady Filipino resident (Jan Hui-ling) who appears to have a bona fide apartment in which she stores goods as if it were a small warehouse and has a fridge packed full with large, solid cuts of meat.

She takes pity on him, rescuing a blanket and taking it up to his place. After the young prostitute disappears from his life, this older woman comes and lies beside him, caressing his side tenderly, but he’s not interested and does not reciprocate.

Instead she must make do with the sleazy, local building superintendent (Jason King Jiah-wen) constantly coming on to her and soon forcing himself on her. It’s unclear to what extent this is consensual and to what extent she enjoys it – somewhere between the two. Some script ideas there (and you can write a script in pictures and or sounds, no-one’s suggesting it has to be dialogue) in need of clarity. Judging by Nina Wu (Midi Z, 2019), Taiwan has been as affected by the #metoo movement as much as anywhere else, so there’s really no excuse for such woolly portrayals of female sexuality.

This is as good a moment as any to invoke the spirit of the late Kim Ki-duk, the bad boy of Korean cinema whose final film Call Of God (2022) is also in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, and who often plays around with notions like this. However, I would argue Kim does so as a deliberate provocateur who has thought things through and, however unpalatable others might find his conclusions, run with them.

In The Morning Of La Petite Mort goes on to further episodes after the prostitute has vanished, in which the delivery boy works at a chicken farm and one night has a crash which leaves him half-blinded and covered with burn scars. The prostitute, meanwhile, comes back into her own strand of the narrative as a mother (now played by Ivy Yin Shin), with one terrific scene where she has sex with a client (Cres Chuang), doing everything for him while he does nothing for her, while she rocks her baby’s hammock style cradle with her foot, a scene and an image worthy of Kim Ki-duk. In another tremendous scene towards the end she discovers the former delivery boy, now scarred with burns, confined to a wheelchair and reduced to selling food from a tray and she buys him a meal from a stall to feed him, her young daughter also at the table, like an archetypal nuclear family. In an echo of earlier, she caresses his forehead and he, now barely able to see, breaks down in grief.

The film may have its shortcomings, however the deft way it juggles the lives of its various protagonists makes it worth a look. A handful of scenes are quite outstanding.

In The Morning Of La Petite Mort premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Flux Gourmet

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

In-fighting, flatulence and freaky food is all on the menu in Flux Gourmet, the latest offering from oddball auteur Peter Strickland. Conjoining his pet themes — the meaning of compromise, deep dives into noise, and the way sex is used as a weapon — into one culinary package, it’s further proof of his unique, uncompromising style. While not reaching the heights of The Duke of Burgundy (2015), it’s a strangely amiable comedy that might not provoke any belly laughs, but kept me wryly smiling throughout.

It occupies a realm between what I’d term horror-light — taking the giallo-lighting, penchant for gore and rapid zooms the genre is often-known for — and light-fantasy, set in an institute dedicated to the fusion between cooking and music. Heading a “band” taking up residency for an undefined amount of time in this location is Ella (a brilliantly prickly Fatma Mohamed), berating her colleagues Billy (an emo Asa Butterfield) and Lamina (a more straight-laced Ariane Labed) for not following her vision to the letter. Soon the band find themselves butting heads with the institute leader, excellently played by Gwendoline Christie. She wears so much black-eyeliner that she resembles a panda.

The film betrays its left-field approach to storytelling early on, when the narrator, Jan Stevens (Makis Papadimitriou), a Greek journalist tasked with documenting this collective, complains of gastric turbulence. There is something wrong with his intestine, leading him to constantly hold in farts. This means that he’s perennially uncomfortable, making his job chronicling the various disagreements within the band incredibly difficult. Their pursuit of culinary performance perfection is later complicated by various rifts between the group, including the sly machinations of the institute leader and a rogue collective previously rejected from the institute lingering menacingly around the edges.

Strickland does a great job of establishing and interrogating the unique personalities of all the players, giving us a TV series worth of content within just two hours. These aren’t just types, but people with their own hang-ups and neuroses, not easily solvable within the confines of a movie. Repetitive moments — from the teams synchronised wake-up to their morning walks to crucial “after-dinner speeches” — give us the full overview of each central character, allowing us to see the story from a variety of different perspectives. One could easily imagine a longer-form adaptation with a different collective appearing each episode.

This is definitely true when it comes to the actual art at the heart of the film, developing Strickland’s obsession with noise as previously seen in The Berberian Sound Studio (2012). I wanted more: from the crackle of fresh food hitting the pan, to the boiling of water, to the crack of an egg opening, hearing conventional kitchen sounds blown up to surround sound is a true auditory delight. But beyond a running joke about a flanger ruining their performance and generic droning sounds, the actual mechanics of the music is left sorely unexplored.

And when the “wind” does finally comes, it simply arrives too late, making for an unsatisfying finale. Nonetheless, I’m happy someone is giving Strickland the money to make films this stylish and weird. I’ll come to his restaurant anytime.

Flux Gourmet played in the Encounters section of the 72nd Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It is out on monst VoD platforms in September.

Drive (Pulsión)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This Argentinan short, although computer generated, has the feel of stop-motion. It brings to mind work by Lars Von Trier, the Brothers Quay, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. A narrative conveyed by a series of disturbing vignettes (think: the opening minutes of Melancholia (Lars Von Trier, 2011) is put together with the same kind of fastidious technical attention to detail you find in the Quay Brothers’ films. A couple of scenes borrow directly from one of the murders in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), but in a clever way that shocks you much as those scenes in Psycho originally did. There’s a Lynchian feel about the whole thing – not just in the strange, quasi-industrial sounds recalling Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977) or the weird lighting and heavily controlled mise-en-scène, but also in the overall feel of strange and terrible things happening within families and local communities, people adrift within the darkness of human existence.

One single viewing is not enough for this film which really only reveals itself on repeated viewings. There’s so much going on here in the characters of a father, a mother, a teenage boy and flashbacks to the teenager as a small baby. After the death of the father who is run over while drunk, the relationship between the son and the mother moves into abuse as she hits him for not eating his food and voyeurism as he spies on her through her bedroom keyhole, referencing similar scenarios in Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) and, again, Psycho. Added to the mix are an animal corpse, a gratuitous rabbit killing and human murders. One particularly shocking scene involves the boy’s estranged friend kissing a girl near an abandoned, wrecked car and the boy hurling a brick at the amorous couple from behind a wall.

The vignettes make the locations appear as model sets suspended in darkness, each built upon a square patch of ground lifted from a wider Cartesian grid. These scenes don’t just appear then disappear in time, their appearance is also isolated spatially from everything around them. It’s an extremely unsettling experience and a unique, highly idiosyncratic vision. One can imagine Casavecchia going on to further forays short or feature length, animation or live action. If he does start working in live action, I hope he keeps returning to animation too because his use of the medium is part of the reason the film works as well as it does here – and it feels as if he has a great deal more to offer audiences.

Drive (Pulsión) played in Annecy where it won a jury distinction for powerful storytelling. Watch the film trailer below:

Little Forest (Liteul Poreseuteu)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Raised in the countryside by her mother (Moon So-ri) but dissatisfied with life there, Hye-won (Kim Tae-ri) moves to Seoul and acquires a boyfriend. But after both of them have taken their exams, she returns to the village in which she grew up to get some space and think about her life.

The boyfriend has passed his exams and is hoping she has done the same, leaving messages on her voicemail to this effect, but she’s still waiting for her own result to come through. She doesn’t respond to his messages.

For reasons that aren’t immediately apparent, but which surface to a degree in the course of the narrative, her mother has left, presumably to start a new life now that the job of raising a well adjusted daughter is complete. She very much exists in Hye-won’s memories though, in which psychic location we she quite a bit of her onscreen, often interacting with Hye-won’s younger self as a little girl.

We also learn that her mum was a single parent after her husband died of an illness when Hye-won was small.

The girl doesn’t really miss the big city and there are compensations. There’s a boy Jae-ha (Ryu Jun-yeol) around her age who has returned from his travels to become a farmer and absolutely loves what he now does. And a girl Eun-sook (Jin Ki-joo) who works at the bank in the nearest town. The latter confesses to Hye-won her designs on the former and good-naturedly warns her to keep her hands off. The three of them spend a great deal of time together, either in pairs or as a trio.

The three-way friendship is genuinely engaging. It could very easily have been played as a love triangle but director Yim Soon-Rye never goes down this route and the film is arguably all the better for it. That was one of the reasons I personally liked this film even more than critical favourite Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018) which has a UK distributor whereas, at the time of writing, this one sadly doesn’t. Running through the whole thing as a non-narrative thread is Hye-won’s cooking, a series of episodes of mouthwatering Korean food porn to make you drool. There have been other movies in this select category over the years: the Danish period drama Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987) and Taiwanese outing Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994) spring to mind.

In fact, the whole film is like a little taste – or numerous glimpses, culinary and otherwise – of paradise. That’s not just the food either – the three characters occupy a very attractive world that you can’t but help to want to live in. The pace of life is slow and moves with the seasons, the film starting off in Winter with snow on the ground and slowly working its way through the rest of the year. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching this in a movie, at least the way it’s done here. It’s a total slap in the face for the ‘get a steady boyfriend, conform’ ethos that to Western eyes seems to underpin feminine notions of Korean social mores.

The property was originally a 2002 manga in Japan by Daisuke Igarashi which spawned a two-part, Japanese big screen adaptation Little Forest: Summer/Autumn and its sequel Little Forest: Winter/Spring (both Junichi Mori, 2014). Judging by the new Korean version, it translates well between different Oriental cultures.

The result is gem which deserves to be picked up for a proper UK theatrical release. (Did I mention this before?) Not least because it may help more accurately redefine notions of manga here. Which in this case denotes rural existence, the passing of the seasons – and cookery.

Little Forest played in the 62nd BFI London Film Festival (LFF), where this piece was originally written. It can be seen again in the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF) on Saturday, November 3rd, 18.30 at the Rio Cinema, Dalston. Tickets here. Watch the film trailer below:

10 Billion (10 Milliarden)

Posted on by victorfraga

As many health and eco-orientated millennials, including myself, turn towards a plant-based diet, it is hard not to escape the overwhelming feeling that the world’s agriculture is being strained by an ever-growing demand for meat. Picking up on this notion and extrapolating it towards the innovative ways small communities are dealing with the problem, 10 Billion hones in on the harsh reality that by the middle of this century, the world population will hit the titular number.

Directed with clarity by Valentin Thurn, who also acts as the focal inquisitive persona in the interrogative documentary, Thurn follows in the footsteps of Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore by conducting his views in front of the screen. Akin to these influential directors in the documentary medium, Thurn uses his own critical, and professional voice, to discuss the fundamental questions that face all of humanity; how will we survive overpopulation?

Unlike Alexander Payne’s recent Downsizing (2017), it is made clear from the outset that in order to sustain the planet, communities and agricultural knowledge must be combined in an effort to endorse local farmers. From India, to Germany and then England, Thurn and his team examine the varying ways that farmers, scientists and eco warriors are attempting to deal with such an impending problem. Commencing in Germany and pharmaceutical and life sciences company Bayer’s approach to hybrid plants that can withstand severe flooding, in every piece of analysis, the documentarian takes a focused methodical evaluation of all the benefits and negatives of each subject matter. In the case of science, it is made abundantly clear that the evolutionary forces of nature over thousands of years are simply no match – at this point in time – to laboratory made plants and synthetic meats.

Consequentially shifting focus to Indian rice farms in their systematic storage of ‘anti-salt’ and ‘anti-flood’ seeds, again the power of communal knowledge, with nature, are stressed. In Britain – just like in India -, small movements of internalising local produce, alongside economics, are the moulds to which bigger governments should aspire towards. Growing seasonal produce anywhere, from car parks to pavements, the small town of Todmorden (in West Yorkshire) has set in motion the Incredible Edible movement – utilising every available space to grow fruit and vegetables. As they state ‘Everyone understands food. Food could get people talking; even better, it could inspire people to take action.’

Away from the agricultural debate, Hajo Schomerus’ camera, after each segment on the subject matter or topic, films the people involved in the labs, farmland or eco movements in a simple yet graceful photographic medium close up. It successfully captures these people’s presence and contributions to preventing global food starvation. Further, they are moments that spring to mind the ephemeral beauty of Agnès Varda, most recently with JR in Face Places; 2017’s best documentary. A criticism of Thurn is that his approach to examining communities et al can become too repetitive and formulaic, leaving little room for innovation; ironic for a featuring the most cutting-edge agricultural innovation.

In a moment of seriousness, one scientist predicts that the next world war could be fought not over oil, hatred or racial divides but food. Everyone in the world, regardless of wealth, cast or ability, deserves to eat good food that isn’t mass produced. Still, In an age where millennials are set to become the fattest generation, according to Cancer Research UK, it is hard to not be so focused on starvation, as opposed to mass obesity. By looking internally to our own communities and land, the future, as proposed by Thurn’s 10 Billion, will be a much healthy, safer and harmonious place.

10 Billion is available to watch on VoD from March 5th, as part of the Walk This Way Collection. Click here in order to watch it on iTunes.