French Cooking, Japanese Toilets, and Bhutanese Democracy
Comings and Goings at the Movies, Feb. 9
The two best movies I saw last year are finally getting an official release this week! I watched them at Cannes last May, so I’m excited that more people will finally be able to see them. (Both films received one-week awards-qualifying runs in late 2023, but it isn’t until now that they’re really out in theaters.) Plus: a review of a delightful Bhutanese comedy about creating democracy.
So I sent out this email without including my customary dinner & drink pairings. Ironic considering one of the movies is explicitly about cooking… I’ve edited the web version to add these sections.
The Taste of Things
Opens February 9 in limited release and expands further on February 14.
As an aspiring gourmand, frequent home cook, and cinephile, there was almost no way I was going to hate this movie about passionate French chefs1. But I wasn't quite prepared for how much I'd love this sumptuous film that’s less concerned with showing off pretty images of food than with exploring what’s left over after we leave this Earth. Director Trần Anh Hùng has made a prequel of sorts to La Vie et La Passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet, a culinary novel that’s highly regarded in France. The book consists of a series of loosely related vignettes, so Trần remixed elements of the original text to craft a more focused love story about two chefs whose romance blossoms at the midpoint of their lives.
Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) is a renowned restaurateur who has since retired to a manor in the countryside. He’s particular (if not a little pretentious) about his food and wine, dines with a small circle of like-minded culinary devotees, and has a slow-burn love affair with Eugénie (Juliette Binoche, Magimel’s real life ex), who happens to be his cook. There are lessons on the dozens of ingredients that go into a sauce bourguignonne, stories about the Pope’s favorite wine, discourses on Carême and Escoffier. This is a very French movie, which may seem curious coming from a Vietnamese-born filmmaker. But writer Phuong Le, writing for Mubi, declares this to be “a radical act, a resistance against attempts to shackle non-white directors to ethnographic confessions.”
The first thirty minutes of this movie unfold in tranquility as Dodin and Eugénie prepare a big feast, which includes vol-au-vent, turbot poached in milk, roasted veal, and a Baked Alaska. There’s no shouting or stressful commands; they’ve done this before, many times, and move with the practiced fluidity of experience. With all the cooking scenes and culinary discussions, you’d be wise to visit a good French restaurant after the movie is over2. But Trần chooses not to linger much on the food itself, instead emphasizing the labor of preparing all these exquisite meals. Cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg supplies the film with tracking shots that glide around soup cauldrons and wood-fired ovens as the cooks chop and fry and garnish. Lighting reflects on the story's emotional current: after the death of a key character, the golden rays of summer that permeate much of the movie decay into a flat, gray light. But as surely as spring will come, the light returns — both in the film and in Bouffant's eyes — after one bite from a masterfully prepared dish.
(I really enjoyed this thorough interview with the film’s director, conducted by Isaac Feldberg, in which I learned that Trần, like many twenty-something Brooklynites, has become a hobbyist ceramicist.)
Et pour le dîner…
This should be pretty obvious — classic French food! Ideally home cooked. When I see it for a second time, I’ll take notes of everything that is consumed in this movie, but this is what I remember.
The big lunch (one day I will recreate this)
Crayfish vol-au-vent
Turbot poached in milk
Roasted rack of veal with sauce bourguignonne & braised cabbage
Baked Alaska (aka omelette norvégienne)
Other things: Ortolans (which is now illegal to eat) and a pot-au-feu
Perfect Days
Opened February 7 in New York & LA and expands to other markets from February 16 onwards.
Perfect Days? More like perfect film! Wim Wenders has delivered a late-career masterpiece, a spiritual successor to Paris, Texas that is nearly as great. And much of the credit must go to this film’s leading man, Kōji Yakusho, who channels Harry Dean Stanton through his own cultural lens. He does so much with just his face that although he barely speaks, Yakusho is no less a compelling presence than the more verbose characters around him.
One could describe the overarching theme with the Japanese title of Hayao Miyazaki’s swan song: How do you live? Perfect Days is a lovely slice of life, at times shattering, other times joyous. Yakusho plays a toilet cleaner named Hirayama, who is entering the twilight of his life. He is alone, and seemingly content with that. It’s not as if he has no hobbies: Hirayama is very well read, he has a good relationship with the owners of his local izakaya and noodle bar, and he loves 70s Western rock music. The needle drops of this movie are impeccable, not just because the song selections are good — including Patti Smith and Lou Reed — but also because the music perfectly expresses what Hirayama never says with words. (It must be said that Tokyo has some very nice public toilets.)
From a visual perspective, there’s a lot to savor. At the end of each day we see Hirayama’s dreams, represented in experimental black and white abstractions that would be at home in a modern art museum. Wenders also uses a similar lighting structure that he used in Paris, Texas and The American Friend: in half the frame we see red lights, the other half have blue lights. A bifurcation of internal and external lives. (This lighting setup may recur in other films of his but I haven’t seen them.)
Wenders converts tedium into bliss, just like his protagonist: as the film progresses, we follow Hirayama’s happy routine and its inevitable disruption when a figure from his past returns. This reunion reveals a past life that he had long suppressed so that he could be comfortable with a simple life. Unlike Paris, Texas, there’s no explosion of emotion, no strip club confessional through a one-way mirror. Nothing’s ever spelled out, but there’s enough breadcrumbs to build up a backstory, and the film ends at a place of disquieted happiness.
I do wonder how much of the movie’s emotional power is owed to the average Western viewers’ connotations of the setting. Japanese people are, rightly or wrongly, often associated with repressed emotions and conformity to etiquette. I’m very curious as to why Tokyo was chosen as the setting, as there isn’t anything inherent to the premise that ties it there. At the very least, Wenders seems to have been partially inspired by Yasujiro Ozu, finding extraordinary beauty in simple living, though this film is far less melodramatic than Tokyo Story or Good Morning.
And for 夕飯…
You could do worse than following Hirayama’s daily ritual: capping off a day of work with a bowl of ramen and a glass of Japanese beer, and some saké if you’re feeling real crazy.
The Monk and the Gun
Opens February 9 nationwide.
The Kingdom of Bhutan, a rural, landlocked South Asian country, is perhaps best known for their conception of "Gross National Happiness," a governing philosophy that strives to balance economic development with sustainability and tradition3. By most accounts, the King enjoys broad support from his people, despite (or because of) its isolation: Bhutan was the last country on the planet to connect to the internet. So imagine the surprise when, in 2006, he gave up much of his power and declared that his country would become a democracy. Elections, political parties, parliaments — novel concepts to the isolated Bhutanese. To ease the transition, the government held a nationwide mock election to teach the citizens all about how this whole constitutional monarchy thing should work.
This era of peaceful upheaval is the backdrop for Pawo Choyning Dorji's wonderfully whimsical comedy of errors, with three interlocking stories set in a small village during the lead-up to the practice vote. Officials from the nascent Bureau of Elections hold training sessions on how to vote, and the newly introduced partisanship creates divides between the villagers. Meanwhile, the village lama mysteriously dispatches a monk to fetch him some guns. An American collector of antique weapons enters the country in search of a Civil War rifle, and as it turns out, that’s the very gun that comes into that monk's possession.
Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan, has no word for "storytelling." Rather, one asks someone to "untie a knot." Experiencing this movie, at first, feels like someone tangling up a bunch of strings, bringing disparate characters together and dramatic irony generating comedic tension. Things get complicated! But at the end, Dorji straightens out all of the plot threads and the film resolves with satisfied relief. Indeed, it’s quite a yarn.
Dorji, who directed, wrote, and produced this film, has a tendency to let his scenes slowly play out over static medium shots. Played silently, you'd think it was in the same fashion as all of the other international arthouse movies. Don't be fooled, because The Monk and the Gun is a hilarious crowd-pleaser that lets the comedy arise naturally, rather than be shaped by jagged editing. There's a running gag about James Bond that made me cackle every time he gets mentioned. But these jokes aren't made at the expense of these villagers; they're not portrayed as backwards yokels. When introducing the film at my screening, the director noted that "innocence can be regarded as ignorance," and he wanted his film to distinguish between the two. He succeeds: unfamiliarity with modernity is not idiocy. These characters just have a different way of life, one more pastoral and communal, which is quite at odds with nearly every other society on Earth.
(The happy Bhutanese country folk depicted in this film is by no means a universal experience, as a minority population quite recently went through some ethnic cleansing. I am not an authority on South Asian human rights, but it was troubling to read about this after a two-hour movie that makes Bhutan out to be a pastoral paradise. Usually, I wouldn't mention this — most movies do not claim to represent an entire nation — but The Monk and the Gun does have a slight propaganda vibe to it.)
And for tsho…
The only dish that’s explicitly referenced during the movie is a pork and daikon soup, which looks pretty easy to make. There are a smattering of restaurants throughout the five boroughs that offer cuisine from the Himalayas, mostly Tibetan and Nepalese. But for specifically Bhutanese food, you’ve got to head to Woodside in Queens: a cursory Google search found Zhego and The Weekender, both of which have recently gotten writeups in major publications.
I do hate the English title for this movie and much prefer the original La Passion de Dodin Bouffant, but perhaps there was concern that American audiences would think this movie was about Jesus Christ.
Because of a tight film festival schedule, the first thing I ate after I saw this movie was McDonald’s, which is quite sad. At least it was a French McDonald’s!
Ironically, the UN's World Happiness Report ranked the country 95th out of 156 nations in 2019, the last year for which the survey was conducted there.
Great week to go to the movies!