Because Food and Cooking are not Everything
Because Food and Cooking are not Everything
There is also art and film...and art films made about food
Last weekend’s Jackson Hole International Film Festival at the National Wildlife Museum was a tour de force of planning, presentation, and delivery for the new non-profit’s inaugural event. The eight films that screened over three days drew an audience that increased each day, with the evening movies garnering the largest number of viewers. As a volunteer for the event, I felt that I was on the ground floor of something looming large.
It was hard to track down JHIFF Executive Director Marni Walsh during the event; she was always just around the corner, tending to details and busy welcoming the VIPs like Festival founder Stuart Suna and the filmmakers who were in attendance. Her well-organized team kept the dozen or so volunteers busy.
The films screened represented a wide range of interests, though none were focused on winter sports, for which the area is justly famous. The Friday afternoon opener, A Great Divide, was filmed in the Jackson area in the summer of 2022 and followed a Korean-American family who moved to Wyoming and experienced hostility from the locals.
Trees and Other Entanglements aired on Saturday morning. Inspired by Richard Power’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Overstory, the documentary by director Irene Taylor was a personal observation of the role of trees in our lives, through five different threads—a bonsai artist, a Weyerhauser scion responsible for much of the deforestation of the West, an artist who specializes in photographing unusual trees all over the world, a steadfast tree planter, and a woman who grew up on a verdant estate in New York that her father tended. Trees and Other Entanglements was funded by HBO and opened on the streaming platform last night.
As a die-hard foodie, my favorite movie of the weekend was Sunday morning’s French film, The Taste of Things, directed by Vietnamese-born French filmmaker Trần Anh Hùng and starring Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel. The film is France’s entry for Best International Feature Film in the 2024 Academy Awards and it is stunning. Known in France as La Passion de Dodin Bouffant, the setting is the Loire Valley in 1885 but we rarely leave the kitchen of the manor where restaurant owner Dodin is quietly and hopelessly in love with his cook of 20 years, Eugenie, played with graceful reserve by Binoche. Their love language is food and the preparation and execution of a menu is their duet, though Binoche never joins him in the dining room with his posse of gourmands.
Pauline, a young niece of Binoche’s kitchen assistant, wants to learn the art of cooking and the couple recognize her extraordinary palate and train her in the making of classical French dishes. Pauline’s response to her first taste of Baked Alaska is memorable, “It made me want to cry.”
Don’t miss this film when it comes out in February and plan on having a French dinner afterward because you will leave the theater hungry. But also full of respect for French food, French wine, French actors, and a French director who transports you to a table set in Heaven.
More soon on Baked Alaska!
