The stuff you learn at the cinema. For example, until I saw the latest film from Trân Anh Hùng, “The Taste of Things,” I had no idea that the French for “Baked Alaska” is omelette norvégienne. Weird. Elsewhere, the movie offers an everyday tip: gently work your fingers under the skin of a chicken and insert thin slices of truffle, the better to infuse the tender flesh. Probably a good idea to kill the chicken first.
Most of Trân’s movie is—or appears to be—about food and drink, and it is set in, around, and near a manor house in provincial France. The date, by my calculations, is the mid-eighteen-eighties. There’s a sprightly walk by a river, and a paradisiacal lunch at a long table under the trees, but we never see the bustle of a town or hear the hoot of a train. The house is owned by Dodin (Benoît Magimel), whose vocation is that of a gourmet. He has a loyal cook, Eugénie ( Juliette Binoche), although, from the start, there is an unusual blurring of social boundaries. The kitchen is Eugénie’s dominion, yet Dodin is often to be found there, helping to prepare the next meal, and at one point he takes over entirely, devising an incomparable dinner for her alone. (This is where the truffle trick comes in.) As she sits and savors it, resplendent in a butter-yellow dress with a high lace collar, one has to ask, Who is at the service of whom?
Esta historia es de la edición February 12 -19, 2024 (Double Issue) de The New Yorker.
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Esta historia es de la edición February 12 -19, 2024 (Double Issue) de The New Yorker.
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INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
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RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.