Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Newish things: Past Days and The Taste of Things play at SIFF.
The Taste of Things
I thought it was a nice home-programming choice on my part to watch Frederick Wiseman's Menus Plaisirs—Les Troisgros and Anh Hung Tran's The Taste of Things on successive evenings, both films being about the art of food—which is difficult to distinguish from the art of living, in each film. Turned out this was unfair to the latter title, because Wiseman's four-hour documentary is utterly unvarnished and absorbing, a masterpiece of food and observation. By comparison, the opening half-hour or so of The Taste of Things, a bravura sequence about the preparation of a vast meal, looks vulgar by comparison: the camera swooping and dipping all over the place, lotsa music, big stars exuding their dazzle. (That last point is not an actual problem for the movie, I hasten to say.)
What follows has its heavy-handed moments, but in general The Taste of Things settles into a tender mood that sustains itself nicely. The premise brings us into the 19th-century world of a celebrated chef-artiste, Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), whose public reputation vis-à-vis cooking a meal is the same as John Wick's reputation for taking revenge on people who kill his dog: almost everyone around him is knock-kneed and speechless at the prospect of the man doing his thing. Dodin knows his debt to his independent-minded companion, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), who prefers to remain in the background of his gastronomical coups in the same even-tempered way she declines his marriage proposals, which she has apparently been doing for 20 years. This carefully shaded love story is at the center of the film, and there is also a moving subplot about a young girl who has something like "perfect pitch" when it comes to food; Dodin and Eugénie take her up as an apprentice, almost as an obligation to the furtherance of their art.
Tran, who made the lovely Scent of Green Papaya, treats the material here in a similarly responsible way, as though carrying out a religious obligation. The final stanza is especially fine, mostly set in the kitchen, a magnificently imagined room that I would like to live in. Tran leaves out some things that are important to the plot but do not need to be shown (so often the hallmark of a good movie), and wraps up on a note of curiosity about what happens next. This qualifies as a foodie movie, for sure, and people will love it for that, but it also isn't about food, in ways you will understand when you see it.
Perfect Days
Perfect Days is another movie in which an accomplished director finds a metaphor for art; in this case Wim Wenders works in a very unassuming manner. But he's been unassuming, to a fault, in so many of his films of the last 30 years. Here Wenders has an ideal subject, though, in his city, his main character, and a job. The city is Tokyo, the main character is a fastidious man (played by Kôji Yakusho) who cleans public toilets. Hirayama lives modestly, going about his daily rituals and playing his cassette tapes of 1960s bands. Nothing huge happens during the time we spend with him; you get the sense we might have caught him a week or two earlier, and the movie would have a similar feel.
When I interviewed Wenders many years ago he talked about how he couldn't make a film without a strong feeling for the location, and he clearly has a feeling for this part of Japan. Knowing a place is part of the movie's emotional effect, not unlike knowing what kind of music you like. At one point Hirayama remembers what used to be in a certain location, and says, "That's what growing old is." These days Wenders puts stuff in his films that he likes, including music and books and certain nondescript but reassuring places, such as the lunch counters and bars where Hirayama has his reliable stops.
The sense of life boiled down to its precious essentials is touching. In the opening shot, and periodically throughout the film, we pause to appreciate the trees waving in the wind, as Hirayama appreciates them. After D.W. Griffith was put out to pasture, he famously sighed that picture-makers had lost the poetry of catching the "beauty of wind in the trees." Wenders appears to have reduced most of his filmmaking interest to that very thing, and Perfect Days is a small, gratifying exercise in exactly that.
February 16, 2024
