Oct-Dec 2010 Screenings

The Taste of Others
(Le Goût Des Autres)

1999 - Agnes Jaoui - 112 mins - France

Fri 15 Nov 2002 at 8.30pm
Joyce's Lounge, Tuamgraney, Co. Clare

“The Taste of Others” does what the French do best--craft romantic dramas that ring true and offer wisdom and insight into the relationships between men and women.

Chief among them are Castella (Jean-Pierre Bacri), a likable boor who finds himself attracted to Clara (Anne Alvaro), a 40-year-old actress who has given up on ever finding love. At the same time, her friend Manie (Agnes Jaoui) begins a relationship with Castella’s tough bodyguard, Moreno (Gerard Lanvin), who has vowed to never settle down with any woman. Then there’s Castella’s neurotic wife, Beatrice (Brigitte Catillon), who prefers animals to people, and his driver, Deschamps (Alain Chabat), who has romantic problems of his own. The linkages between the characters are never forced and the performances are uniformly pleasurable. Some of the people, such as Beatrice, could have been sketched in more depth and Jaoui’s direction is somewhat clunky but this sweet film will leave you smiling.

Jean-Pierre Bacri is the Rouen industrialist who falls for Anne Alvaro, an actress with whom he becomes transfixed. Gérard Lanvin is Bacri's bodyguard who in turns falls in love with Jaoui's Manie, a drug-dealing barmaid. Outside this central quartet are numerous other examples of relationships and friendships that are somehow or other dominated by a sense of cultural snobbism and oscillating power structures. Bacri's wife has decorated the house 'like a chocolate box', all garish pinks and floral kaleidoscopes. Alvaro's fellow actors ridicule Bacri in an excruciatingly embarrassing scene because he thinks Ibsen is a comic, whilst Wladimir Yordanoff sees Bacri's wealth yet lack of cultural nous as an excuse to get him to buy soulless modernist tableaux.

Jaoui has readily acknowledged her debt to Woody Allen. She screened many of his films before shooting and his artistic imprimatur is readily identifiable. The ensemble bar scenes are impeccably choreographed and the clever use of classical music and drama lends a further layer to the film, highlighting its impenetrability as well as its beauty. The shift between long, fluid takes and short, tightly edited one-on-one confrontations is also engaging, moving the action (and the moral) from micro- to macro-meaning in a single shot. What elevates the film is the acting (another debt to Allen). Rarely in contemporary French cinema has so much acting talent been so harnessed and fleshed out. The characterisation is initially sketched and then broadly painted; Bacri's love-lorn philistine may hog the best lines, but poignant cameos like his downtrodden sister or his wide-eyed, unassuming chauffeur helps bolster and reinforce a truly engaging chamber-piece this is in many respects cruel yet ultimately hints at something more uplifting and invigorating. Indeed, the conclusion brings little in the form of romantic closure or reconciliation; instead an awareness from the audience that French provincial bourgeois existence is rigidly hierarchical, and that despite its Pygmalion pretensions, neither we nor the protagonists can ever really understand the 'taste of others'.

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