The duo formed by Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel makes you hungry in The Passion of Dodin Bouffant by Tran Anh Hung, screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Both embody gourmets who, around 1885, shared the love of good food. They love each other, they cook, they eat. And the conquered spectator is delighted.
“Benoît Magimel and I had a child together in real life, explains Juliette Binoche. So we had a very strong bond even before we started filming, ”she recalls at 20 Minutes. She hadn’t been so beautiful on screen for a very long time and neither was Benoît Magimel! But the most beautiful is in the plates. It’s a feast for the eyes and ears if not the taste buds offered by the Franco-Vietnamese director of The smell of green papaya which evokes gastronomy again thirty years after its first noticed film. “I agree to share the limelight with food and to be considered as an appetizing dish”, specifies Juliette Binoche who, herself, likes to cook. Especially the pot-au-feu which gives the film its Anglo-Saxon title. “I put less butter in my dishes than the cook I embody,” she comments. French cuisine is really swimming in butter. The dishes prepared with the help of Pierre Gagnaire are very appetizing, but not necessarily the most healthy.
“The film celebrates the pleasure of food as we no longer have time to practice it in our modern lives. And the appetite comes seeing the duo chopping vegetables, preparing a broth or tasting what they have prepared. If the heroine’s lover is her boss, that does not prevent Juliette Binoche from embodying a strong woman for whom the kitchen is not a place of confinement. So certainly her lover often joins her in front of the stove to cook with four hands. So of course, he insists on formalizing their relationship, but she refuses. “They are happy like that and she does not want to change,” insists Juliette Binoche. Their beautiful story in any case makes the mouth water and the heart celebrates.