Just One Scene: The Taste of Things Opening Cooking Sequence
For when you don’t want to talk about the whole movie, but you can’t stop thinking about a specific moment, character, or sequence, there’s Just One Scene.
A few months ago, I went to see The Zone of Interest with some friends at Alamo Drafthouse, a theater with a full food menu waiting to be ordered from throughout any showing. Like two of my three movie-going companions, I decided to eat before the movie already knowing the themes and tone of the film I was about to watch and instead opting for a single beer, which still felt like a comical mistake. The fourth member of our crew, however, wasn’t able to have a snack prior so she instead opted to eat a Caesar salad over the course of the movie’s 105-minute runtime. This, I would say, was a mistake as there might not be any film from the past decade that feels less appropriate to crunch down on a shard of romaine or a massive crouton in the middle of the many eerie soundscapes then The Zone of Interest. There are simply some movies you should not eat during, with The Zone of Interest currently holding the world champion belt for that title.
However, there are also films you should eat before seeing in fear of becoming blindingly ravenous as the opening scene plays in front of you. For example, the opening cooking cooking sequence from 1994’s Eat Drink Man Woman where a father/husband prepares an immaculate Chinese feast for his wife and daughters that can only be described as X-rated.
Similarly, while not the first scenes in either case, you could say the same about the famous timpano-making montage from 1996’s Big Night (shouts to the Tucc lord, wherever you are) and in 2014’s Chef when Jon Favreau prepares spaghetti aglio e olio for Scarlett Johansson in what can only be described as equally X-rated, but maybe for slightly different reasons.
Also, continued shouts to Favreau for casting Sofia Vergara as his ex-wife and ScarJo as his employee/lover in a movie he both wrote and directed. What a legend.
While there are countless movies that you should not see on an empty stomach, there might be no film that defines this more so than last year’s The Taste of Things. And more specifically, the movie’s 38-minute opening sequence in which Juliet Binoche prepares a multi-course French feast in the late 1800s for a group of noblemen and businessmen who are guests of her employer/pseudo-lover/estate proprietor.
There are a LOT of questions about this film and who these people are and why they’re so well-off and important, but that’s not the point of this. Rather, this is quite simply the best cooking scene I’ve ever seen in a movie. While it’s not available online, you can get a very brief, ahem, taste of what I’m talking about in the trailer.
Binoche’s Eugénie, with the help of her employer/lover Dodin (played by the father of Binoche’s second child, Benoît Magimel (God damn, France. You’ve really outdone yourself)) and their two young kitchen assistants, prepares immaculate course after immaculate course that includes roasted rack of veal loin, boiled crawfish, seafood pie encased in pastry, turbot with hollandaise, and flambéed baked Alaska (in a time when ice was, let’s just say, a luxury, let alone ice cream), all of which you get to watch bubble, poach, and sear in all the butter you could ever imagine. Bacon sizzles, greens wilt, and consommé is purified, all to the tune of nothing but the kitchen’s humming and brief instructions from person to person as they float around the kitchen, never rushing and always with a smile upon their faces.
As director Tran Anh Hung apparently told his crew while filming the intricate sequence, “This is my car chase,” and while you never really fear for any sort of collision or true danger, both the anticipation and excitement continue to build as Binoche keeps adding ingredients to each dish in a perfectly timed ballet of chopping, stirring, tasting, skimming, and plating. It is simply one of the most beautiful things you’ll ever see in a movie, even in one so dedicated to love and the gourmet.
The sequence ends with Pauline, the younger of the two kitchen assistants, sitting down to try the Baked Alaska and being caught between shock and elation after tasting it — which I can imagine being a near religious experience for a semi-rural farm kid living in late-19th century France. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t extremely relieved when I remembered I had some ice cream left in my freezer that I could enjoy as the story continued on. If not, I would’ve had to scrounge for an apple or some rogue almonds in my cabinet. And while both would’ve provided some level of satisfaction as I continued on with one of the most sensuous movies ever made, both feel about as low as you can go in terms of appropriate in-movie treats for a film as delicious as The Taste of Things.
Well, accept for maybe a Caesar salad.
