Eating as Self-Care and ‘The Taste of Things’
Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche in director Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things.
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Before the foodie, we had the gourmet. A nineteenth-century French gentleman, and unfortunately always a gentleman (the French word has no feminine form), the gourmet is an expert connoisseur of haute cuisine. Sunday, at the Tomorrow Theater, you can see one of these sybarites for yourself, played by Benoît Magimel in The Taste of Things ($15). The film, which won Tran Anh Hung best director at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, shares something with internet videos of cobblers and teapot craftspeople. Its extended cooking sequences (ardent, romantic, balletic, and nearly nonverbal—one runs 30-minutes long) are a psychological massage, a choreography familiar enough to play yourself into, yet far past the reach of even the most ambitious home cook.
Over the years, the word gourmand came to connote gluttony, whereas gourmet grew to suggest a restrained elegance. While enthusiastic eating leans masochistic these days, in this classiest mode, noshing was historically a totally noble form of self-care. You might stretch to see the idea as similar to how we, in this century, in America, look at yoga, meditation, and mindfulness practices—all soul-cleansing pleasures you might label “woo-woo.” That, at least, is the angle of this screening, at which the local movement and mindfulness studio Woo-Woo (the name is an effort to reclaim the often pejorative term) will host a breathwork workshop to attune moviegoers’ senses for a maximum of sensorial cinematic pleasures.
More Things to Do This Week
books Adam Ross
7pm Sun, Jan 12 | Powell’s City of Books, FREE
Ross’s sophomore novel, Playworld, centers an illicit, age-gap “relationship.” In 1980, in New York, as Reagan is telling Carter “There you go again,” Ross’s 14-year-old, child-actor protagonist, Griffin, has an affair with a 36-year-old family friend, Naomi. It’s a sign of the times, political theater distracting from civilian realities. “Benign neglect is the norm,” Alexandra Jacobs writes in a glowing New York Times review. “So is malignant attention.” In conversation with Portland novelist Jon Raymond, Ross will unpack his recent-historical novel that reads uncomfortably contemporary today, 45 years after its plot.
Untitled by L.W.D. from North Country at Nationale.
visual art L.W.D. & Jodie Cavalier
Thru Feb 9 | Nationale, FREE
North Country, a collection of paintings by Los Angeles artist L.W.D., or Little Walt Dog, is a study in perspectives. Three dimensions collapse dramatically into two on his canvases; billboards and the cars and bottles of booze they depict blur in a surreal scale; and the literal and philosophical viewpoints of those driving the lowriders L.W.D. grew up worshipping meld with those in cop cars surveilling every corner of Watts, Compton, Gardena, and Torrance. North Country and a concurrent exhibit of Jodie Cavalier’s found object assemblages and cameraless photography, Figured that you, were curated with the artist Gabriel Garza.
theater Kimberly Akimbo
Various times Tue–Sun, Jan 14–19 | Keller Auditorium, $29.75+
Winner of five Tonys, this touring Broadway musical follows the namesake Kimberly, a 16-year-old whose family recently moved towns, as she navigates teenage turmoil. Except Kimberly has a rare condition that makes her age four-and-a-half-times faster than normal. She’s 16 going on 72.
What We’re Reading About Elsewhere
- Carrying the wisdom of Dorothy the “one-eared cat who hisses at nothing” and other animal friends into the new year. (Mercury)
- Oregon’s lack of jobs for certified librarians. (Willamette Week)
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