February 22–March 1, 2001

movie shorts

The Taste of Others

recommended

Husband-and-wife team Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri have written and starred in a number of French films, including Alain Resnais’ Same Old Song and Smoking/No Smoking (adapted from Alan Ayckbourn’s play) and Cedric Klapisch’s Un Air de Famille. With Le Goût des Autres (whose literal-minded English title is simply atrocious) Jaoui makes her directorial début. Jaoui and Bacri’s scripts — which they submit on audiotape, with themselves playing all the parts — have much to do with interlocking social relationships and miscommunications. Here, the stories revolve around characters who’ve decided they want to break out of their ruts and experience the ways others live life; a bourgeois factory owner (Bacri) falls for a stage actress (Anne Alvaro) while a strait-laced but promiscuous bodyguard (Gérard Lanvin) tries to go steady with a self-possessed barmaid (Jaoui) who deals hash on the side. It’s not a particularly exciting film, and the obsession with class immobility and bourgeois strictures is oh-so-French, but Taste is sensitive and real in a way few American films bother with, a slight pleasure, but a satisfying one.

—Sam Adams

See the trailer!