A Matter of Taste (Une affaire de goût)

Rousset: “His palate was so refined, everything had to be cooked in perfect harmony. Cuisine is an art in itself.”A Matter of Taste (Une affaire de goût) is an ambiguous movie: is it about auto-destructive behavior, manipulation, closeted homosexual passion, the moral corruption of wealth, or all of the above simultaneously? Whichever the reader finds it to be, the movie centers on food—specifically, the dishes that Rivière (Lorit) is hired to taste for Delamont (Giraudeau): pigeon casserole made with garlic, onion, lemon, and verbena tea; hors d’oeuvres with rabbit and black olive paste; five-flavor pork; fava bean and Parma salad; tripes à la grande-mère. There are also the foods that Rivière eats as part of his training (lobster, crab, shrimp, oysters, poached turbot with hollandaise sauce, apple tart) or recommends to his employer’s business associates (scampi with grapefruit and seafood). Unexpectedly, the personal taster is promoted to a much higher position—becoming a surrogate? a twin?—as Delamont compels Rivière to “taste” much more than what’s served at the dinner table, with fascinating and dire consequences for both men.

Released 2000
Directed by Bernard Rapp
Written by Bernard Rapp and Gilles Taurand; book Affaires de gout by Philippe Balland
Starring Bernard Giraudeau as Frédéric Delamont, Jean-Pierre Lorit as Nicolas Rivière, Florence Thomassin as Béatrice, Charles Berling as René Rousset, Jean-Pierre Léaud as Le juge d’instruction, Artus de Penguerm as Flavert, Laurent Spielvogel as Doctor Rossignon, and Elisabeth Macocco as Caroline
Awards: 2000 Cognac Festival du Film Policier “Unravel” Award, Critics Award, and Grand Prix; 2000 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Special Mention

9½ Weeks

John: Every time I see you, you’re buying a chicken.
Elizabeth: Every time I see you, you’re smiling at me.

Extremely controversial in its time because of the explicitness of the sex scenes, 9½ Weeks depicts a short but intense love affair between two lonely New York City professionals, a successful and assertive Wall Street trader and a recently divorced and emotionally fragile art gallery director. Indeed, the film sets the standard for erotic scenes that include food: John (Rourke) compels Elizabeth (Basinger) to close her eyes and sit on the floor, then with great sensuality he feeds her a variety of delicacies—strawberries, olives, honey, wine, Jello, pasta, milk, eggs, soda, cherry pie filling, even a green chili pepper—as foreplay to their passionate lovemaking.

Released 1986
Directed by Adrian Lyne
Written by Sarah Kernochan, Zalman King, and Patricia Louisianna Knop, based on the novel by Elizabeth McNeill
Starring Kim Basinger as Elizabeth, Mickey Rourke as John, Margaret Whitton as Molly, David Margulies as Harvey, and Christine Baranski as Thea

Fun Facts:
9½ Weeks was released just one year after the Japanese release (though one year before the U.S. release) of Tampopo, a movie that spoofs the use of food in erotic film sequences.

Eat Drink Man Woman (Yin shin an nu)

Chu: Eat, drink, man, woman. Basic human desires. Can't avoid them. All my life, that's all I’ve ever done. It pisses me off. Is that all there is to life?
Old Wen: We should be thankful that we’re still alive and cooking.

Jia-Chien: It’s strange, I don’t have any childhood memories unless I cook them into existence.

A bittersweet film, Eat Drink Man Woman depicts the ageless story of family life, that of children maturing and rebelling against their parents’ way of life. Despite Master Chef Chu’s (Lung) best culinary efforts, he can’t seem to get the attention of his three grown daughters, who are in the process of discovering their individual identities apart from their natal family. Indeed, one daughter complains to her friend about having to get home for the “Sunday dinner torture ritual.” Nevertheless, he continues to infuse all his kitchen creations with fatherly love, and his daughters eventually come to understand how much they mean to him.

Chu’s cooking is, indeed, amazing to an American audience raised on fast food. Here, for example, is the lunch he prepares for his friend’s daughter to take to school: spareribs, crab with vegetables, shrimp with green peas, bean sprouts and sliced chicken, and bitter melon soup—five courses for a five-year-old!

Though Chu can’t believe it, his daughter Jia-Chien (Wu) inherits his talent for cooking. Here’s what she prepares for her boyfriend: carp with garlic sauce, duck-oil sautéed pea sprouts, squid rings, duck sautéed with garlic, and tofu dumplings. Her recipe for Tsu-An Tofu is as follows: “tofu blended in with chicken, steamed in the pot until it looks like a beehive, which is then cut into pieces and stewed with ham in an old hen broth.” The cooking truly follows the ancient Chinese philosophy: every meal must include a balance of energies, flavors, and types of foods—sweet and sour, mild and spicy, hot and cool, crunchy and smooth, vegetable and fish, grain and meat, and so forth.

The ingredients for this film were so successful that director Ang Lee repeated the basic plot in Tortilla Soup—with an entirely different cuisine, of course.

Fun Facts: The movie’s opening sequence shows the preparation of an amazing host of dishes for the family’s Sunday dinner: fried carp with chiles, water chestnuts, and bamboo shoots; ribs; chicken; frog legs; crab dumplings; Peking duck; hot pot; and more. The dinner is so involved that filming the preparation and cooking of this meal alone took more than a full week.

Released 1994
Directed by Ang Lee
Written by Ang Lee, James Schamus, Hui-Ling Wang

Starring Sihung Lung as Chu, Yu-Wen Wang as Jia-Ning, Chien-lien Wu as Jia-Chien, Kuei-Mei Yang as Jia-Jen, Sylvia Chang as Jin-Rong, Winston Chao as Li Kai, Chao-jung Chen as Guo Lun, Lester Chit-Man Chan as Raymond, Yu Chen as Rachel, Ah Lei Gua as Madame Liang, Chi-Der Hong as Class Leader, Gin-Ming Hsu as Coach Chai, Huel-Yi Lin as Sister Chang, Shih-Jay Lin as Chief’s Son, and Chin-Cheng Lu as Ming-Dao

Awards: 1994 Asia-Pacific Film Festival Awards for Best Editing and Best Film; 1995 Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Film; 1994 National Board of Review Award for Best Foreign Language Film

Tea with Mussolini

Lady Hester: Look at that ridiculous American monstrosity they’ve given the child. What do they call them? Knickerbocker Glories. Oh! It’s amazing. They can even vulgarize ice cream.

Based loosely on the childhood of director Franco Zeffirelli, Tea with Mussolini traces the lives of a group of elderly Englishwomen who have made Florence their home. When the Fascists comes to power, the group’s ranking matriarch, Lady Hester Random (Smith), makes an appointment to have tea with Mussolini (Spadaro) and thus secures his promise of protection, but when England and Italy go to war, Il Duce breaks his word and imprisons the English nationals. The “Scorpioni” are forgotten in an old Italian hill town, save by Luca (Wallace), whose father had years earlier placed his young “illegitimate” son in the care of Mary Wallace (Plowright), and the wealthy American art collector Elsa Morganthal (Cher), who pays for their room and board until she herself is imprisoned when the United States enters the conflict.

What is perhaps most unusual about Tea with Mussolini is the near complete absence of food in a film featuring life in Italy. Tea, of course, figures prominently in the pivotal scene when Lady Hester visits Mussolini, but it is a very simple affair. Luca breakfasts on bacon and eggs with Italian bread, and he also enjoys a delectable ice cream sundae known as a “Knickerbocker Glory.” Possibly the lack of food is a reflection of the Depression and wartime setting of the story, or maybe it is an indication that despite all proclamations of fondness for their adopted country, the English could never really embrace the essence of Italy, the Italians’ utter abandon to the sensual pleasures of good food and fine dining.

Directed by Franco Zeffirelli
Written by John Mortimer and Franco Zeffirelli

Starring Cher as Elsa Morganthal Strauss-Armistan, Judi Dench as Arabella, Joan Plowright as Mary Wallace, Maggie Smith as Lady Hester Random, Lily Tomlin as Georgie Rockwell, Baird Wallace as Luca, Massimo Ghini as Paolo, Paolo Seganti as Vittorio Fanfanni, Claudio Spadaro as Mussolini, Mino Bellei as Cesare, Paul Chequer as Wilfrid Random, Tessa Pritchard as Connie Raynor, and Michael Williams as British Consul

Awards: 2000 BAFTA Film Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Smith); 2000 Hollywood Makeup Artist and Hair Stylist Guild Award for Best Period Hair Styling-Feature and Best Period Makeup-Feature; 2000 Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Silver Ribbon for Best Costume Design

Fatso

Nurse: These are your Do’s, and these are your Do Not’s. Do broil all your meats. Do drink eight glasses of water a day. Do eat all the fresh green vegetables you want. Do drink two glasses of nonfat milk a day. Do not drink any alcoholic beverages. Do not drink soda pop. Do not drink –ades or punches. Do not eat butter, margarine, oils, lard, or fat of any kind. Do not eat fried foods. Do not eat bread. Do not eat bananas, grapes, watermelon, or any fruits other than grapefruit or cantaloupe. Do not eat canned fruits. Do not eat dried fruits. Do not eat noodles. Do not eat spaghetti or macaroni of any kind. Do not eat pizza. Do not eat popcorn, potato chips, or pretzels. Do not eat puddings or custards. Do not eat ice cream, frozen custard, or frozen yogurt. Do not eat cookies, pies, cakes, pancakes, waffles, or any baked goods. Do not eat chocolate, caramel, fudge, nougat, nuts. Do not eat syrup….

Considered to be ahead of its time in terms of understanding the emotional lives of overweight persons, Fatso is a somewhat melancholy film showing how difficult it is to change one’s eating lifestyle. After his cousin Sal dies from obesity, Dominick (DeLuise) joins Chubby Checkers to lose weight, entrusting the keys to the kitchen cabinets and refrigerator to his baby brother, Frankie (Carey). However, becoming ravenous in the middle of the night, Dominick threatens Frankie with a butcher knife in order to get the keys back; Frankie calls Dominick’s Chubby Checkers buddies to help Dominick through his crisis; but Dominick and his Chubby supporters just end up talking about their favorite foods and how good it feels to eat. Suddenly losing control, they rip the doors off the cabinets, then gorge themselves on spaghetti with tomato sauce, lasagna, pizza, bread, more pasta, ice cream, donuts, chocolate cake, chocolate-covered graham crackers, bran cereal, and more. In the end, Dominick never does become a thin person; though his burgeoning relationship with Lydia (Azzara) takes his mind off eating and he does lose a little poundage, he eventually realizes, “When I eat, I’m me” and learns to love who he is, even if he is a little fat.

Dominick: He was like a mother to me. He always had something on him to eat.

Antoinette (to Dominick, who has just delivered part of his nephew Anthony’s birthday cake): You ate the “ony”!

Dominick: God, why do they want me to be skinny? I’m not so bad as I am. Am I?

Dominick: You know something, Junior? You don’t know how to run your plate. You’re thirty-two years old, you don’t know how to run your plate. The omelet is supposed to come out even with the bread.
Frankie: I told you I don’t want all that bread. You made me too much bread. You always make me too much bread.
Dominick: And you don’t even dip your bread. I made the omelet nice and soft in the middle so you could dip your bread (dipping the bread in Frankie’s eggs).
Frankie: Get out of my eggs.
Dominick: A little bit of hot pepper on it.
Frankie: Will you stop putting hot pepper on my eggs!
Dominick: You don’t even butter your bread. Look, no jelly? Here, this nice jelly Zi Marie made: apricot and pineapple. Oh, nice, here.
Frankie: I told you, I don’t want that much bread. Don’t you understand? I’ve been telling you that for a hundred years. You love bread. I don’t love bread. I like bread. Don’t you understand I gotta watch my weight?

Dominick: Dinner. Lasagna for you. Broiled chicken and kale and nonfat milk for me. No bread. Come on. Eat. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, help me.
Frankie: … Great lasagna. How’s your kale?

Dominick: Thrilling. Thrilling. Want some bread? One piece. (placing it next to Frankie’s plate) In case you change your mind.

Released 1980
Written and directed by Anne Bancroft
Starring Dom DeLuise as Dominick DiNapoli, Anne Bancroft as Antoinette, Ron Carey as Frankie, Candice Azzara as Lydia, Michael Lombard as Charlie, and Estelle Reiner as Mrs. Goodman

The Color Purple

Lauded for depicting the triumph of the human spirit over adversity, The Color Purple does not show much in the way of family meals, but it does have a wonderful breakfast sequence. Still smitten with Shug (Avery), the woman he was too afraid to marry many years ago, Albert (Glover) brings her home to his farm after her performance and their night carousing in town, expecting his wife, Celie (Goldberg), to both allow him his pleasure and wait on his beloved. When Shug demands breakfast in the morning, Albert, so eager to ingratiate himself, insists upon cooking, though he doesn’t even know how to heat up the stove; but Shug completely rebuffs his efforts, hurling the charred food against the wall while screaming that he’s trying to kill her. Pleased to see her husband suffer abuse for once, Celie proceeds to make Shug a splendid breakfast repast: pancakes with butter, ham steak, fried eggs, grits, biscuits with honey, and coffee. Nervously, Celie slides the tray of food inside the door of Shug’s room, waiting across the hall “to see what the wall gonna look like.” Shug skitters the tray out the door and across the floor, but it is empty when she does so—causing Celie to smile in spite of herself.

Celie: I just stand back, and I wait to see what the wall gonna look like. See what kind of colors Shug’s gonna put on there now.

Released 1985
Directed by Stephen Spielberg
Novel by Alice Walker; screenplay by Menno Meyjes

Starring: Danny Glover as Albert Johnson, Whoopi Goldberg as Celie Johnson, Margaret Avery as Shug Avery, Oprah Winfrey as Sofia, Willard E. Pugh as Harpo Johnson, Akosua Busia as Nettie Harris, Rae Dawn Chong as Squeak, and Laurence Fishburne as Swain

Awards: 1987 ASCAP Film and Television Music Award for Top Box Office Film; 1987 Blue Ribbon Award for Best Foreign Language Film; 1986 Casting Society of America, USA, Artios Award for Best Casting for Feature Film, Drama; 1986 Directors Guild of America, USA, Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures; 1986 Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture-Drama (Goldberg); 1988 Image Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Motion Picture (Goldberg) and Outstanding Motion Picture; 1986 Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director; 1985 National Board of Review, USA, Award for Best Actress (Goldberg) and Best Film-English Language; 2005 Black Movie Awards for Classic Cinema Hall of Fame

Fun Facts: The Color Purple was Whoopi Goldberg’s first feature film and Oprah Winfrey’s first movie.

An Armadillo Cake?!?

Clairee: Where’s the other one you were talking about? “Cuppa, Cuppa, Cuppa.”
Truvy: That’s simple. You don’t need to write that down. That’s a cup of flour, a cup of sugar, a cup of fruit cocktail with the juice. Then you mix and bake at 350 until gold and bubbly.
Clairee: Sounds awfully rich.
Truvy: It is. So I serve it over ice cream to cut the sweetness.

Shelby: Wedding cake in the dining room and the groom’s cake … hidden in the carport?
M’Lynn: Shelby and I, we agree on one thing.
Shelby and M’Lynn: The groom’s cake.
Shelby: It’s awful. It’s in the shape of a giant armadillo.
Truvy: An armadillo? You’re joking, right?
Shelby: No, Jackson wanted a cake in the shape of an armadillo. He’s got an aunt that makes them.
Clairee: It’s unusual.
M’Lynn: It’s repulsive. It’s got gray icing. I can’t even begin to think how you’d make gray icing.

Shelby: Worse, the cake part is red velvet cake. Blood red. People are gonna be hacking into this poor animal that looks like it’s bleeding to death.

Known much more for its catty Southern repartee than its Southern food, Steel Magnolias brings together a host of superb actresses to depict the strength and resilience of women who face life’s inevitable uncertainty, loss, and death. The film does include a famously funny “food” scene, in which the bride’s father (Skerritt) requests a slice of the groom’s cake, a red velvet concoction shaped like an armadillo, from his sworn enemy and neighbor (MacLaine). Without a word, she slices off the tail and butt of the armadillo and plops it on his plate—to which he responds poker-faced, “Nothing like a good piece of ass.”

Drum: Ouiser, can we call a truce long enough for me to get a piece of cake?
(Ouiser cuts off the tail and butt of the armadillo cake and plops it on Drum’s plate.)

Drum: Thanks, Ouiser. Nothing like a good piece of ass.

Ouiser: Yes, Annelle, I pray! Well, I do! There, I said it, I hope you're satisfied.

Annelle: I suspected this all along!

Ouiser: Oh! Well don't you expect me to come to one of your churches or one of those tent-revivals with all those Bible-beaters doin' God-only-knows-what! They'd probably make me eat a live chicken!

Annelle: Not on your first visit!

Clairee: Very good, Annelle! Spoken like a true smart-ass!

Fun Facts: The film is set in the fictional town of Chinquapin in Chinquapin Parish, Louisiana. The word chinquapin is the name of both a fish and a variety of oak tree. Coincidentally, the real town and parish of Natchitoches, where the movie was filmed, are named after the Naktosh Native Americans, and naktosh means “those who eat chinquapin.”

Released 1989
Directed by Herbert Ross
Written (play and screenplay) by Robert Harling

Starring Sally Field as M’Lynn Eatenton, Dolly Parton as Truvy Jones, Shirley MacLaine as Ouiser Boudreaux, Daryl Hannah as Annelle Dupuy Desoto, Olympia Dukakis as Clairee Belcher, Julia Roberts as Shelby Eatenton Latcherie, Tom Skerritt as Drum Eatenton, Sam Shepard as Spud Jones, and Dylan McDermott as Jackson Latcherie

Awards: 1990 Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Julia Roberts); 1990 People’s Choice Award for Favorite Dramatic Motion Picture (tie with Batman)