The Taste of Others (2000)

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Charming and brutal

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

What a nice work, how good film makers and actors Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri are! Nothing is cheap in this beautiful film: not a word, not an expression, not a frame. The movie earned an Academy Award nomination in 2001 (in the end 'Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon' won) and I think that everybody will enjoy it very much, just as I did.It's a small gem, narrating how people from very different backgrounds came across each other and how they did interact. Their strengths, they weaknesses, their needs and their dreams are represented in a most catching way: more than von Donnersmack's it reminds of Gérard Lauzier (the cartoonist), but with human comprehension in the place of cruelty. And fun: when i think back to Jean-Pierre Bacri's face staring at the paintings in the gallery I still laugh!

This odd-couple ensemble comedy was reportedly inspired by "Hannah and Her Sisters," but in this case co-writers Jean-Pierre Bacri and Agnès Jaoui are working on a bigger canvas with a broader brush. Instead of those wrapped-too-tight Manhattanites and their 85-room apartments (very common in NYC), we get a dufus businessman's Norman cottage done up in Late Laura Ashley and the tiny "piaules" where a cute waitress (Jaoui, who also directed) cooks pasta for her boyfriends and deals a little hash or, as the case might be, a lovelorn chauffeur practises his flute. As the title suggests, there's an element of culture clash—M. Castella, the businessman (Bacri), is blown away by an actress's performance in a Racine tragedy ("Crap, it's poetry!," he grumbles as the play begins), but she can't get too interested, at least in principle, in a guy who tells peepee-caca jokes and confuses "Rigoletto" with the Juanita Banana jingle (she doesn't even know about the Danielle Steele thing…). And as with Woody, the script does pander a bit—M. Castella finally gets it right when he buys an opera CD and, to atone for an antigay slur at a gallery opening, an abstract painting that clashes with his wife's decor. Likewise, there's a funny moment when M. Castella's tough-guy bodyguard, Frank, exercises his droit de coolest guy in the room (trying hard to avoid a spoiler here), but it's the flute-playing chauffeur, Bruno, who turns out to be the better man. I'm not sure there are too many life lessons for us here, but "The Taste of Others" is lively and involving from start to finish; the dialogue is sharp and slangy, and if you learned French in high school, you may pick up some useful new words. Available on disk from Netflix.

That may sound so stupidly common, but life is great to watch, life itself, real life, is the greatest show on earth...Not the fantasy, not science fiction, not any form of imagined world, but life just as it is. To make good films, good literature, good fiction, you have to, just like Agnes Jaoui does, observe, select, edit, put on paper and finally on screen small scenes of everyday life.And the result and the final meaning of this is that we are all humans, weak, filled with doubts, longings, ego. Life is miserable but beautiful also. There is a shortage of everything, starting with love and communication, money, power. We , with few exceptions, the great majority of us walking on the streets, filling in the markets, the sideways, sitting on our couches home, in our beds , we are the subject of this great, enormous movie.

Why can't American directors make movies like this? It's quiet, calm, small, understated, beautifully paced (read: slow and leisurely) and thought-provoking. The premise of the movie is not whether opposites attract (which would be nothing new) but whether our preconceptions often keep us closed down to new people and new experiences. With some gentle nudges, the characters in this lovely movie take deep breaths, look again at people and situations, and see what had been missed before. And yes, it does make us think about how art enriches us and helps us abandon the old preconceptions. Jean-Pierre Bacri is, as usual, splendid, making himself mildly repulsive and appealing, almost simultaneously (though he ends up definitely on the appealing side of the line.) How does he do it? And it's a treat to know that the actress playing the younger woman, Manie, is both the film's director and screenwriter. If you want to know what I mean about pacing, just watch the main character, Clara, as she comes out of cafe after having been stood up for an English lesson. An American director would have cut the scene as she leaves the cafe and bustles across the street in the rain, annoyed and wound up tight as a drum. But in this movie, the camera follows Clara as she walks in the rain down a long street - the shot just lasts forever, and you can see all of Clara's irritation dissipating and turning into loneliness. It's a beautiful shot.