Visual Feasts

Hero Image

Title

Visual Feasts

Byline

By Ben Elliott

Body Copy

At first thought, movies about food don’t make a lot of sense. Food engages your senses of taste and smell, while movies can only use light and sound. How could a movie ever encapsulate the sensory and emotional experience of cooking and eating a meal?

For a long time, they didn’t try. Gastro-cinema — movies that intertwine their characters' emotional journeys with the creation of food — didn’t emerge until the late 80s and early 90s. Most of the early examples of this genre were foreign films that came from countries where cooking was an integral part of culture and family life, like Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, Alfonso Arau’s Like Water for Chocolate, and Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman.

Water for Chocolate

Rich Text

These are all very different movies, but they’re all stories about passion. That passion can be love or lust, or — as it is in Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci’s Big Night and Jon Favreau’s Chef — it can be the passion required to create true art in a commercial world.

One of the movies opening at The Triplex this week, The Taste of Things, is the latest film to explore this intersection of passion and food, telling the story of two chefs who use food to express their true feelings for each other. Add in the fact that director Trần Anh Hùng cast real-life exes Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel as his leads, and you have a simmering tale that’s an instant classic in the genre (and makes for great Valentine’s Day viewing).

Boy and the Heron

Body 3

It’s this passion that makes gastro-cinema so evocative. It’s not just that these movies depict the process of cooking, but that they show the intense emotion and feeling that goes into every step of that process. They remind us what it takes to truly express ourselves, and how rich and rewarding it can be to connect.

Marketing Signup

Bump

Footer