"I thought it was hard" - Bondiewithlove

This year’s Oscar race for best international feature film was full of surprises: Japan chose a work by a German director (Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days) as its official entry over works by local legends like Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, while France chose Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things over Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall. And while The Taste of Things is considered one of the most acclaimed films of 2023, its star Juliette Binoche believes that its Oscar bid led many to unfairly criticize it.

In a new interview with The New York Times, Binoche opened up about the backlash the film received for beating Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” and what she thinks critics misunderstood about it.

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“First of all, we didn’t choose to be selected, we were chosen in spite of ourselves,” Binoche said of the film’s Oscar submission. “We put our lives aside and gave it our all to do all the interviews.”

She added that the film’s failure to receive an Oscar nomination had prompted some voices in the French press to attack it with what they saw as superficial criticisms that missed its main points.

“After being rejected (from the nomination), Le Monde redoubled its efforts to criticize our film. It was very mean, saying that the film was conventional and old-fashioned, that it was only about food. Some actors – famous ones at that – even liked this article on Instagram. I thought: ‘Wow, really?’ It was hard for Hung, who makes a film every four or five years. I found it hard, really hard.”

Binoche previously shared her more nuanced thoughts on the film in a 2023 interview with IndieWire, in which she explained that the film uses food as a way to illustrate the creative process and how the connection over an art form can nourish a relationship.

“He really focused on love, this relationship of sharing through an art form which is the art of cooking,” she said. “That’s the movie we made. It’s a fairy tale. It’s not a true story. For me, it’s an analogy between the director and the actors. The director has the idea as a chef or creator of these recipes, but the cook does it for real, and the actor is the cook, he embodies an idea.”

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