I think I’m watching different films to the critics: perfect days was pretty depressing about an abused child from a well off family eking out an isolated and lonely life as a toilet cleaner and trying to find some meaning in small things.
This has a similarly contemplative and elegiac atmosphere though set in idyllic countryside. The two main characters are artists living in an isolated rural community and seeking the satisfaction of a life lived every day as itself.
But it didn’t shy away from the bleakness, the madness, the isolation and loneliness, the extreme poverty, and diminished lives.
Sure everyone gets to walk around the lake and watch the seasons but that’s all some of the people had in their bleak lives.
I recently bought a vhs deck at the thrift store and also that movie from their stack to test it.
watched the whole tape, no issues with the mechanism but turns out the heads need cleaning. still haven’t gotten around to that.
I used to have a cleaning cassette but it’s gone. probably still available on scamazon, come to think of it. you can remove the head and clean it manually, but that hasn’t happened yet.
the movie was great, I remember seeing Farnsworth on the Tonight Show promoting it but wasn’t until years later I learned it was a Lynch film, and only now saw it because of thrift store luck of the draw.
The Grey Fox is another great Farnsworth movie, that was the first movie I saw of his.
I watched the film that’s entitled in English “The Taste of Things,” with Juliet Binoche. I loved it, and as is so often the case, she’s glorious. The food and it’s preparation that it’s centered around are often the same, and I thought the cinematography and sound design did an amazing job of pulling me into the moment and its available sensuous delights in daily life, if only one pays attention for them, even in the outdoors scenes.
Spoilers ahead!
I sometimes read reviews after a particularly rich or thought provoking movie, and I couldn’t find any that read the story the way I did.
I thought the love story slyly subverted itself somewhere near the end. The wealthy master chef adores the hire cook played bt Binoche, fawning over her in ways that you’d think any heterosexual woman would enjoy immensely.
But then, she dies. He’s completely devastated, and he treats several people like shit, turning back each time to stare mournfully out a window. Oh what a devoted lover! Our master chef just cannot go on! With cooking, that is.
Soon, he agrees to interview new women that might replace Binoche’s character, replace her that is as the second half of a goumet cooking team. He could not have cooked as well before, he admits, without her help. He coldly rejects the unsatisfactory efforts of several applicants, but then, one woman’s dish is satisfactory. In fact, it’s amazing, so she will do! Revived, he rushes off to hire her.
I see the story as a sort of allegory, about tortured male artists, and about bourgeois men, both of whom often use others, especially women, for their own ends. The complete absence of other workers, such as gardeners and delivery people, seems part of that too. The beautiful home, kitchen, and garden and wooded estate start to seem suffocatingly cloistered in that respect, and the gourmands who indulge in incredibly complex dishes start to seem silly. To me anyway.
I did! I’ll watch most anything with La Binoche in it!
I think you are right. Most of the film was about how she was aware of the power imbalance (structural) and how she sought to subvert it and assert control over herself. so her marrying at the end when she was dieing was a bit odd. Maybe the intention of the ending was a more conventional “man without woman can’t be complete yada yada”? Though your reading is more apposite.
The gourmanderie was, I think deliberately ridiculous. Most obviously so when the visiting 10hr menu was on the go but even in other parts.
Myself and my mate were just slavering at the produce and cookware throughout though.
Yeah, I go back and forth with it. I mean, I remember the director’s The Scent of Green Papaya, where sensory enjoyment of gorgeously shot food was also greatly emphasized. I think the grotesque excess of the meal presented by the Prince of Eurasia (?! that title is also odd) was supposed to be a sort of foil for Dodin’s refinement, which he partly expresses with a more limited, balanced, and so on menu.
So I think there is supposed to be some real pleasure evoked by good ingredients well prepared, pleasure that the sound design and visuals encourage to indulge in.
Still, Dodin’s own meal’s many fussily exquisite courses got excessive too, and that gang of drooling men, whose main pleasure in life seems to be extremely expensive drink and food (often prepared with very rare ingredients), became ridiculous to me too, especially the scene where they’ve traveled somewhere to cover their heads with towels while slurping up what I think is a cooked bird (which has probably been shot, cleaned and cooked by still more unseen servants).
Thanks, I think my reading works, but I also agree that [spoiler]her consenting to marry is odd, given her insistence on independence. Maybe she did so because she knew death was coming, so her independence no longer mattered.
And btw, I also wonder if we’re encouraged to think of him treating even her body merely like food-- remember that shot of a cooked pear juxtaposed with her nude backside? Hmmm…[/spoiler]
Anyway, I do think there’s a lot more to the story than most viewers and critics seem to see, so dazzled are they by the food porn, and by what seems on the surface like a fairly conventional love story.
I watched The Scent of Green Papaya, as gorgeous and captivating as I remembered from seeing it a long time ago. Similar pace, lush photography, long stretches with no dialogue. I think the eventual love story is more straightforward than the one in Binochet’s vehicle.
