24 years after Les Enfants du Siècle, Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel relive a passion for love but also for taste under the watchful eye of director Tran Anh Hung and festival-goers, delighted to find this mythical couple on screen as well as in the city.
They climbed the tender and complicit steps on May 24, sometimes laughing, sometimes embracing, united by a bond that everyone has been trying to define with precision since they both presented La Passion de Dodin Bouffant in Cannes, in competition.
Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel. Remember: almost 25 years ago, they lived a beautiful love story that gave birth to a young Hana seen recently alongside her star mother in With love and acharement. At the time of the filming of Children of the Century by Diane Kurys, Juliette was more of a star than Benoît and he was ten years younger than her. Enough to feed the heavy chatter.
Now, after 20 years apart, the ‘difference’ has given way to something akin to ‘equality’, both being at the peak of their great and beautiful careers and time. definitely having no hold on Mrs. Binoche.
Equality therefore, but also balance and intimacy. These are the words that stand out when you see them brought together here under the loving eye of Tran Anh Hung. A true declaration of love for French gastronomy, his film in competition features the story of the famous gastronome Dodin Bouffant and his outstanding cook for 20 years. By dint of spending time together in the kitchen, a loving passion has been built between them where love is closely linked to the practice of cooking.
From this union are born dishes that are all tastier and more delicate than each other and that go so far as to amaze the greatest of this world. However, Eugénie, eager for freedom, never wanted to marry Dodin. The latter then decides to do something he has never done before: cook for her…
Gaumont France 2 Cinema
“Measured”deep, the courtly romance that unites the two heroes “in the autumn of their lives” is from another time, greatly facilitated on screen by what these two great stars of French cinema experienced in the city, magnificent and imposing within this outdated decor.
Hearing him sigh with pleasure while eating the dishes he has concocted for him is worth all the enjoyment; and the description he makes of the journey of food from his mouth to his belly all poetry.
Gestures so precise and slow that they become sensual, an incessant and demanding quest for taste, eloquent and concentrated silences, perfumes, textures, consistencies, temperatures, a gentle mixture too: at Dodin Bouffant, it is through good food that flesh delights.
It is also through the passion for his profession that the necessary otherness is maintained: “In the film, Eugénie asks Dodin if she is above all his wife or his cook”, reminded us Juliette Binoche, laughing kindly at a Benoit Magimel amused, during the dedicated press conference.
“Benoît had a hard time answering! He always wanted to say “my wife”. But by answering “my cook”, he “precisely gives his wife her place, her independence in a film that is much more feminist than it seems “she further analyzed.
“It’s finding what you’re made for that makes life worthwhile because you evolve from something mysterious. Then you can share it with someone, evolve. But knowing that she’s a cook first and foremost gives her a clarity of what it is made for. This does not prevent it from loving and being loved.”
A story of couples in more than one way, La Passion de Dodin Bouffant finally celebrates, it is easy to understand, the harmonious professional collaborations that have given rise to precious love stories: that of the two characters first of all, then that of their mythical incarnations reunited on screen and finally that which linked the director and his working partner Yen Khe, to the artistic direction, present at his side at all stages of the project “to raise it to the maximum of its beauty” and above all make it… fair. It is to the latter that the film is dedicated.
If you want to extend the Juliette Binoche passion, know that on Mubi, a cycle consisting of nine of these films celebrates his impressive filmography.
Our first meeting with Tran Anh Hung: