#Juliette Binoche on Being Wooed by French Cuisine and Working With Her Ex

In France, cinema is known as the “seventh art” (the other six being painting, sculpture, music, dance, architecture and photography). Tran Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things, the country’s 2024 Oscar entry for international feature, makes a powerful argument that gastronomy should be No. 8. The film, which won the Vietnam-born, Paris-based Hùng the best director honor in Cannes this year and is getting a limited domestic release Dec. 13, is a mouth-watering visual feast of sizzling meat, melting butter and fluffy, light-as-air puff pastries — all prepared for the camera by Pierre Gagnaire and Michel Nave, a pair of Michelin three-star chefs who acted as gastronomic manager and culinary adviser, respectively, to Hùng on the set.

“Hùng wanted us to have the real gastronomical experience of tasting the food during the takes, so everything we eat onscreen is real,” notes Juliette Binoche, who stars in The Taste of Things as Eugénie, the personal cook, and lover, to top 19th century chef Dodin Bouffant, played by Binoche’s former real-life partner, Benoît Magimel. The couple share a long history together — in the kitchen and the bedroom — but Eugénie, determined to maintain her independence, refuses to marry Dodin. In a bid to win her over, he decides to do what he has never done before: Cook just for her. For Binoche — like Magimel, a passionate amateur chef — the film was an opportunity to reconnect with her co-star over their shared love of food.

Who’s the cook in your household?

I cook myself. I have kids and, in my opinion, you have to know how to cook when you have kids because that’s the first relationship you have with them: the one of eating, of feeding, of loving and being loved, being taken care of. I might have an assistant prepare things, do the peeling, or cutting or whatever, but I do the cooking. Cooking can unite people. Cooking is a good tool to lift the spirit, to lift the heart into something warmer, because food is really about being warm, about making something warm for the people you love. Unless maybe you put poison in it. (Laughs.)

What did you learn from watching Pierre Gagnaire prepare those phenomenal meals?

The experience felt more like painting than cooking, more artistic than technical. The culinary art for me is like any art: It has to be done, performed. It is about the gestures, which don’t have to be perfect, but have to flow. Pierre Gagnaire was there and we watched him, and his gestures are not perfect, but they are right enough for what he needs to keep the flow of the cooking, to keep the freedom. We went into his kitchen when they filmed him preparing the food and really watched the pace of how he did things: What was he doing before he put on the broth, what was he doing afterward? I studied his gestures and observed the way he was cooking, which, as I said, was not perfect but was more a way of being. Like painting. When you paint, you don’t try to be perfect; you express an emotion, a feeling with the color and the material. And that’s what I observed with him. It’s this mysterious alchemy of artists that find a way of transforming matter into something exquisite, with chefs turning flavors, textures and consistencies to match with a sense of taste.

Hùng shot the cooking scenes with one camera in what feels like real time. How challenging were those choreographed meals to shoot?

Hùng is always describing himself as a technical director, because he specifically did not shoot this in the separate shot/reverse shot manner, but always kept us together in a harmonic way. The scenes were shot as a sequence, which I didn’t find difficult because I’m used to that. And when you understand in the cooking process what comes before and what comes after, you already have that in your mind. What was difficult was not burning my fingers. Most of my concentration was focused on saving my fingers.

The cast meals on this movie must have been amazing.

Any time I had a moment when I was not shooting, I ran into the kitchen to learn another recipe or technique. 

What did you find compelling about Eugénie as a character?

When we start in the film, Eugénie and Dodin have been together for 20 years, and she never wanted to become his wife or even go up the stairs to sleep in his bedroom. He has to descend to her. She excels in what she does in the kitchen, but she is very peculiar, refusing to eat with the others, to sit back and enjoy the meals she makes. There’s a logic to that, in her saying, “I don’t want to get married because I want to stay independent.” And of course, she knows she is sick, even though she denies it to others and maybe even herself. For her, to keep cooking is a way to stay alive, to hide the fear and hide the pain. 

What was it like to reconnect with Benoît Magimel?

We knew each other a long time ago, but during all those years apart, we didn’t see each other that much. Being on set with him was like rediscovering him. At the same time, I was cautious because I didn’t know how close we could be when talking to each another. One of the joys of being able to make this film for me was this reconciliation as a gift to our daughter. She watched the film a week ago, and she was overwhelmed. I think it healed something, deep down. Separations are not easy, especially when you have children, but there’s always a way to heal. It is amazing when we have an art form to help you to do that: a means of expressing ourselves to others, whether it’s painting or writing a love letter or poem or playing music or making a cake. There’s always a way to express something you cannot express with your own words because it’s too heavy. It’s too difficult. When an art form can transform that feeling into something lighter, maybe better, truer, it’s amazing. 

This story first appeared in the Nov. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.