The Taste of Others

Shari L. Rosenblum

Opening with Racine's irresolvable romance and closing with Piaf's romantic resoluteness, France's contribution to this year's Academy Awards could not be more French. LE GOUT DES AUTRES (The Taste of Others) is an adult film of the first gallic order - good-humored rather than comical, contemplative rather than tragic - an incisive slice of life that offers neither moral nor closure.

Chacun a son gout, the saying goes. Each to his taste (to each his own). This is the premise Agnes Jaoui explores in her directorial debut. With insight into the sparks that light up other people's eyes, she chooses to illustrate rather than question some of the incalculable clicks and clashes that make the difference in who we are: the art that grabs us, the decoration that makes our houses our homes, the friends we take to, the lovers who make us complete.

The story, from a screenplay by Jaoui and her husband, Pierre Bacri, centers on a character played by Bacri - Castella, an uncultured and uncultivated man of industry involved in some dubious business deal that may be putting him at physical risk. In the spaces in between, we follow the paths of other characters as well - characters whose names, like Castella's, give us some clues to their nature. "Castella," identifying the film's focal capitalist, is a play on the Italian for "castle." His bodyguard (Gerard Lanvin), a man with a questionable past, is named "(Franck) Moreno," hinting in Spanish at that dark side; his chauffeur (Alain Chabat) is called "(Bruno) Deschamps," conjuring from the French images of fields and a certain sense of naif; the barmaid who gets between the two (Jaoui), a quirkily promiscuous dealer in hashish, is called "Manie," suggesting in French both a nominal mania and a verbal double play on handling, and the actress whose appeal for him changes both of their lives (Anne Alvaro), is called "Clara," a romance language notation of clarity. Castella's wife (Christiane Millet), an interior decorator with a thing for floral patterns and a dog she cares more for than for her husband, is named Angelique. The character is almost entirely tangential, but the growing recognition of the irony behind her naming becomes a key to her husband's point of departure.

There is not much physical action as these characters meet and interact, but the emotional interplay is precise and refined.

From the beginning, the camera is aligned with Castella, but it is not immediately sympathetic toward him. He is the kind of man the kind of people who go to this kind of film might disdain - a man not with bad taste but with no time for taste at all. The kind of man who has never considered the esteem-hording power of pretension - who does not get jokes about Ibsen or Strindberg, or get that they are made at his expense - the kind of man who, dragged kicking and screaming to see Berenice, goes back to see it again, not because it is Racine's great romantic triumph, but because he is taken with the actress in the title role.

Contrasted with the friends who fill that actress's circle, Castella seems an irredeemable philistine. But impose himself on them he does nonetheless, with the industriousness of a man of his background. Whether obtuse or merely unremitting, he is relentless in his pursuit of Clara's lights. Yet what he discovers first and foremost are his own. The camera, harsh at first, comes to soften toward him as he finds the shape of his own aestheticism, genuine and unprodded, and vulnerability comes to replace boeotian materialism in his mien.

Slowly, the film transforms the question of taste from the measure of a man others might take to a measure a man might take of himself. Clara and her friends, boors by a different social standard, and self-interested home decorator Angelique, must come to take stock of their own as well.

From the sidelines, Franck and Bruno watch it all, shake their heads, and suffer from their own devices: Bruno, a would-be casanova, being jilted from afar - Franck, with impressive notches on his belt, wanting in spite of himself to settle down. Between them, Manie, trapped in her easiness, cannot imagine why she has remembered the one or will have to forget the other. And so it goes.

Nothing really happens in the film in the Hollywood sense, but in the end, amid the most telling parting glances, and looks for and of reassurance, what strikes is how great a distance has been traveled. Billed as a romantic comedy, The Taste of Others has true touches of sadness; even its anticipated heartbreaks are oddly poignant. Still, it manages to strike a middle ground without compromising its authenticity - somewhere between the declaimed suffering of thwarted lover Berenice in the beginning and the musical "what the hell" of the triumphantly played marching orders of "Je ne regrette rien" ("I have no regrets") at the end. It is something akin to the Verdi aria that wafts through the film's center, Caro Nome (Sweet Name) - a tender, if tenuous, reminder that whatever one's taste, and wherever it leads, there is pleasure to be found in the name of love.

CineScene, 2001