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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 15, 2023For many Japanese readers — and readers around the world too, actually — Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood is one of those novels, a book read during youth that somehow defines, at least for a few years, your inner self. Like Catcher in the Rye, it’s a book readers feel they have an intimate relationship with, which makes it also a tough film adaptation. A filmmaker can always do the plot and the characters, but what about capturing that something else? With his adaptation of Murakami’s 1987 novel, director Tran Anh Hung (Cyclo, The Scent of the Green Papaya) has shaken […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 8, 2012