The spiciest Oscars drama is in France
People are being real dumb about the second-best movie of the year.
A few minutes into the opening scene of The Taste Of Things, you might let out an, “Oh no.” The movie has a 136-minute run time. It begins in a garden before moving into a kitchen, tracking what becomes a 38-minute ballet among a few cooks preparing food the way you’d find it done at King or The River Cafe: simply, and perfectly. It should be too precious to work. This small story set in 1889 France should be twee to the point of intolerability. But buoyed by Tran Anh Hung’s direction and Juliette Binoche’s biting performance, it unfolds into a masterpiece. My second-favorite film of the year. And quietly the center of the most fascinating behind-the-scenes drama at the 2024 Academy Awards.
The Taste of Things received zero Oscar nominations on Tuesday. None for Hung. None for Binoche. And none for Best International Feature, despite rather contentiously being chosen as France’s official submission over the legal thriller Anatomy Of A Fall. According to Variety:
This year’s French committee, which ended up clashing violently over the final decision, according to several insiders, included former Lionsgate boss Patrick Wachsberger, Charles Gillibert, the producer of Annette, Oscar-winning composer Alexandre Desplat, as well as directors Olivier Assayas (Carlos) and Mounia Meddour (Papicha), and sales agents Sabine Chemaly and Tanja Meissner. The vote came down to 4-3 split but then one person who had voted for The Taste of Thing” changed their mind and asked for a second vote which was turned down, according to an insider.
The narrative since May, when Anatomy Of A Fall won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and Hung won best director, is that France had to choose between a progressive breakthrough in Fall and blasé traditionalism in Taste. And unfortunately the narrative here matters, because the primary reason this snub happened is Neon, Anatomy Of A Fall’s distributor, running circles around IFC, which oversaw the campaign for The Taste Of Things. Neon is an indie giant, second only to A24, and orchestrated the Parasite moment in 2020. IFC, frankly, doesn’t know what it’s doing.
From the outside, it appears IFC’s plan here was to casually walk into a Best International nomination and then ramp up a press moment before finally releasing the movie in February. That gave Anatomy Of A Fall four crucial months to sway voters, many of whom I’m guessing still haven’t even seen The Taste Of Things. It also cleared the way for some shenanigans.
Last fall, Justine Triet, Anatomy Of A Fall’s director, reposted a story on Instagram that said, “To not risk winning the international feature Oscar, France chose not to submit Anatomy of a Fall (Palme d'Or winner and box office hit - almost a million tickets sold) but one of the most boring/annoying official selections at Cannes. Too much honor to give to a female director perhaps?” While The Taste Of Things waited around to finally be released, Anatomy Of A Fall got to be the cool, fun indie pushing French cinema forward.
Which, like, okay. Can we be reasonable here? I can’t go as far as
calling Anatomy Of A Fall, “No better or worse than any episode of anything on TNT,” but I also won’t defend it against such claims. It’s pretty good. Sandra Hüller is a great actress. Milo Machado Graner has one amazing scene. I, too, think the “P.I.M.P.” beat rips. But no one will remember this move in 12 months.Meanwhile, The Taste Of Things transcends its foodie label to breathtaking degrees. Here’s lead actor Benoît Magimel describing the film to Vulture. (It should be noted that the stars of the film, Magimel and Binoche, fell in love and had a daughter together before splitting up 20 years ago. Saltburn could never).
Cooking was always a thing between [Binoche and me]. We seduce the person we love by making nice dishes for them. It’s something that really spoke to me — it was meant to be. When I read the script, I cried. You always wonder when you enter a relationship with someone, How can it last? That’s what this movie is about. It’s so modern. This woman is afraid of breaking the magic by getting married.
The movie is about even more than that. It’s portrayal of love, pain and the struggle for artistic achievement reminds me most of Drive My Car, an international film that (mostly) got it’s proper recognition for having the sense to be released before Thanksgiving.
This all clears the way for an easy Zone Of Interest win in International, which I can’t get behind. The movie is a technical achievement from Jonathan Glazer. But, man, it just does not work. It looks and feels important. That doesn’t make it particularly good. Glazer essentially half-steps his attempts to show the routine life happening on the other side of the wall at Auschwitz. I’m with Richard Brody on this one all the way.
By gussying up hallucinatory sequences as cinematic emergencies rather than as regular rounds like those of the rest of the film, Glazer again and again emphasizes that the film’s apparent ordinariness is faux—that these daily lives are indeed extraordinary and horrific, elements of a historic tragedy. Yet his blatant exertion to get that point across suggests a lack of confidence that viewers will get the point from the drama alone—and a fear that his dramatic choices indeed risk diminishing those horrors. The filmmaker appears to want it both ways—to make subtle allusions that are given meaning by vehement jolts, to avoid specifics while pounding out generalized emotions.
2023 was one of my favorite movie years ever. It’s rare that the list of 10 best picture nominees contains so many worthy projects. And it blows that the second-best thing that came out last year is being cast aside because of … marketing. Yikes.
Alright, now some good stuff. A loaded list of music, food and fashion bangers and jams from the past couple weeks.