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The Passionate Epicures: The Taste of Things Director Tran Anh Hung Interviewed by Frederick Wiseman
![The Taste of Things - Still 8 | Filmmaker Magazine A woman eats at a small wooden table while a man sits opposite looking at her.](https://filmmakermagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/THE-TASTE-OF-THINGS-Still-8-2.jpg)
A long-gestating passion project for Tran Anh Hung, The Taste of Things takes as its starting point Marcel Rouff’s eccentric, echt-French novel The Life and Passion of Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet, which follows Dodin-Bouffant in the wake of the death of his longtime cook and occasional sexual companion Eugénie. For his adaptation, Hung retains a few of the book’s incidents but otherwise chooses to tell the story of Dodin-Bouffant and Eugénie’s life before the novel starts. A period romance set in 1889, Taste begins with a lengthy sequence of pure cooking—when I saw the film at Cannes, a woman behind me moaned […]