La passion de Dodin Bouffant
Tran Anh Hung, Belgium, France, 2023o
Eugenie, an esteemed cook, has been working for over the last 20 years for Dodin, a fine gourmet. Growing fonder of one another, their bond turns into a romance and gives rise to delicious dishes that impress even the world’s most illustrious chefs. When Dodin is faced with Eugenie’s reluctance to commit to him, he decides to start cooking for her.
A culinary costume drama in three acts whose ingredients are the fictional restaurateur Dodin Bouffant's (Benoît Magimel) passion for cooking and his cook (Juliette Binoche). The preparation of a meal is followed by its consumption, which is accompanied by expert commentary, and then its slow digestion. Here, the big meal appears as something refined and sensual and thus as a counterpart to the Grande bouffe of the cruelly ingenious Marco Ferreri, who focused more on the mundane end of the digestive process. The Vietnamese director Trần Anh Hùng (L'odeur de la Papaya verte), who was trained and works in France, ennobles the pieces of meat and the baskets of vegetables. His camera hardly knows where to look in the (impeccably clean) kitchen so as not to miss any of the little wonders in all the pots and pans. The initial, slightly unsettling impression that we are watching an arthouse version of the MasterChef cooking show soon gives way to the much more pleasant feeling that we are being given the time we need to eat well, love well and live well. All of this, of course, in an upper-class way.
Émilien Gür