***½
Country: France
Director: Agnès Jaoui
In 2000 Agnès Jaoui, who had been a film, television, and stage actress for more than fifteen years, ever since she was a teenager, directed her first film, The Taste of Others, which she also co-wrote with her husband Jean-Pierre Bacri and, along with Bacri, acted in. The Taste of Others established the essentials of Jaoui’s style in all three movies she has written and directed. Jaoui treats plot as a process of discovery, using incident to illuminate character. Each of her films is constructed around a set of characters loosely connected by circumstances. They interact in a variety of shifting combinations in what might seem a casual, almost semi-improvised plot but is actually a skillfully engineered series of incidents that cumulatively reveal more about these people than we first saw or were shown. We may believe we immediately recognize these people, who seem straightforward types conforming to a set of self-defined behavioral patterns. But placed before the observing lens of Jaoui’s camera, they gradually become real people with distinct identities and deeper personalities than at first seemed possible.
The Taste of Others opens in a restaurant. In the main dining room, three people are having a business lunch, while in the smaller room at the front of the restaurant, two men dressed in anonymous dark suits have a desultory conversation—at one point comparing how many women they have slept with during their lives—while sipping drinks. The three executives get up to leave, and as they pass through the smaller room, the two men follow them out. It is only when they all get into the same car, the executives in the back seat and the two other men in the front seat, that we realize they are together. One of the men in the rear is Jean-Jacques Castella (Jean-Pierre Bacri), a wealthy middle-aged industrialist. The men in the front are his driver Bruno and his bodyguard Franck Moreno.
Later we meet Castella’s wife, an interior designer whose main preoccupations seem to be imposing on others her inflexible opinions on correctness in décor (the rooms she decorates are hideous in their oppressively fussy idea of tastefulness) and her spoiled, snappish pet dog. When the Castellas go to the theater that evening to see a performance of Racine’s Bérénice—something Castella sees as a frivolous waste of time but submits to because his niece has a small role in the play—Castella becomes fascinated by the lead actress, Clara Devaux (Anne Alvaro). He recognizes her because that afternoon he interviewed her as a candidate to teach him conversational English and, quickly taking a dislike to her, dismissed her. Now he sees her in a different light and not only insists on meeting her backstage but decides to hire her to tutor him after all.
Clara barely tolerates the conservative, bourgeois Castella, who lives in a utilitarian world of business and finance untouched by aesthetics or ideas. But Castella, growing more and more infatuated with Clara, begins insinuating himself into her bohemian world, hanging out in the evenings at the bar frequented by Clara and her friends in the theater and art worlds. Here we meet the worldly barmaid Manie (played by Jaoui herself), a spontaneous, independent woman who supplements her income by dealing hash and grass on the side. Bruno and Franck, who accompany Castella to the bar, also become acquainted with her and both end up sleeping with her. For the chauffeur Bruno, a sad sack whose fiancée is away in the US and who spends his spare time playing the flute in an amateur ensemble, this is a fleeting dalliance. But Franck, an ex-policeman and compulsive womanizer, and the free-spirited Manie soon fall into a relationship and it begins to look as though these two emotional gypsies might settle down together.
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1956
