It’s round mid-morning on a day in 1889, and simply as she’s ladling swimming pools of cloudy inventory over fish, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) loses her stability. She and her two younger helpers on this French countryside kitchen have spent hours peeling cherry-red crayfish and roasting rosy loins of veal for her boss of 20 years, a gourmand named Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), and his circle of male pals. Some name Dodin the “Napoleon of culinary arts,” a sobriquet that makes him bristle. He is aware of that Eugénie, his cook dinner, is the motor of his genius.
Her labor doesn’t go unrecognized, for everybody can see that theirs is a dance of equals: He normally conceptualizes menus whereas she executes them, unerringly. And Eugénie’s talent is supreme. Her baked Alaska, with its scorched peaks of meringue, is so potent that it may make the individuals who eat it nearly cry. The issue, as her spell of incognizance signifies, is that Eugénie is ailing.
Eugénie’s lapse arrives about 20 minutes into the almost half-hour-long introductory scene of the Vietnamese-born director Trần Anh Hùng’s The Style of Issues. The French-language movie hits theaters in Los Angeles and New York immediately for a weeklong awards-qualifying run — it’s France’s official entry to the Finest Worldwide Characteristic Movie class on the 2024 Academy Awards — earlier than a large launch in February. Based mostly on a 1924 novel by the Swiss writer Marcel Rouff, the movie first turned heads at this 12 months’s Cannes Movie Competition, the place Hùng gained the Finest Director award. It’s not troublesome to see why: This primary, show-stopping sequence alone, which takes place largely within the kitchen, suggests a craftsman working on the prime of his type. But the movie struggles to maintain the promise of that hypnotic opening set piece.
The procession of pictures in the beginning of The Style of Issues would possibly recall the culinary pageantry supplied by movies like Tampopo (1985), Babette’s Feast (1987), and Huge Night time (1996), which have all gained reputations as quintessential meals movies. The Style of Issues, by advantage of that first scene, would possibly look like it’s jostling for a spot in that vaunted canon. (This isn’t Hùng’s first use of meals as a story instrument, both: his sterling 1993 debut function The Scent of Inexperienced Papaya has generally appeared in such discussions of seminal meals motion pictures.) However what The Style of Issues lacks, particularly in comparison with these titles, is a gratifying emotional arc to accompany its gastronomic spectacle.
Because the movie progresses, the viewer learns that Eugénie is certainly troubled with an unspecified deadly illness. Nonetheless, she cooks, although her inventive schools are tarnished by the monster coursing by way of her physique: she will be able to barely stay standing within the kitchen, her pure area. As Eugénie fades, the bond between boss and worker additional tightens. He generally watches her bathe, although they sleep in separate rooms. They’re biding time earlier than they resolve to marry, one thing that Eugénie, valuing her independence, had lengthy resisted. In a gesture meant to woo her, Dodin cooks her an elaborate dinner one evening, serving her oysters, rooster, and champagne pulled from a shipwreck on the backside of the ocean. He appears to deal with the meal as if it is likely to be her final.
Eugénie’s sickness offers the movie its faint heartbeat, and Hùng treads delicately. The Style of Issues operates in a low key, and constructing dramatic stakes doesn’t appear to be Hùng’s motivating intention. Somewhat, he tries to precise the distinctive rapture of being fed by somebody you like, who is aware of your tastes in addition to you your self do.
The problem, then, arises with Hùng’s miscalibration of the movie’s competing components. His sensualism fares higher with meals than together with his characters. In The Style of Issues’ best moments — which happen within the kitchen — Hùng appears to find a brand new language for capturing gustatory pleasure by way of movie. His method is so tactile that the sight of pearly caviar beads appears downright carnal. You’ll be able to scent the gum of rendering bacon fats, the sweat of butter being strained right into a pot.
However this feast of images finally begins to really feel extra indulgent than purposeful. Hùng paces his 135-minute-long movie so languidly that its engine sputters. He exams the viewer’s funding in his two protagonists and buries their wants beneath the bloat of extra. He tries to understand the cinematic potential for utilizing meals as a conduit for situations of the soul — pleasure, longing, each feeling that sits in between — however his potential to take action in the end exhibits its limits.
Hùng’s aesthetic preoccupations come on the expense of protecting the inside lives of those characters on the fore. It is a actual disgrace, contemplating the very positive work of his two leads (they have been as soon as romantic companions off-screen, and their connection stays palpable). Binoche is characteristically effervescent, and he or she brings nice dignity and pathos to this function of a lady who’s cooking in opposition to time. Her carriage is wraithlike, implying she would possibly break at any second, however she additionally conveys resolve. Magimel matches her with each beat, switching registers on a dime. He’s tender when the event requires it and a spark plug of fury in others, significantly when Eugénie’s absence turns into an imminent actuality, making clear that no cook dinner will ever be capable to finest her brilliance in his thoughts.
However each performers are soldiering by way of a movie that appears to be colluding in opposition to them. When the inevitable tragedy of Eugénie’s illness strikes, the occasion registers extra feebly than it ought to. For a movie ostensibly predicated on demonstrating the religious transcendence of cooking for — and being fed by — the particular person you like, The Style of Issues commits essentially the most cardinal sin of all: It leaves you hungering for extra.
Mayukh Sen is the writer of Style Makers (2021) and a forthcoming biography of the actress Merle Oberon. He has acquired a James Beard Award for his meals writing, and his work has been anthologized in three editions of The Finest American Meals Writing.
