Danish melodrama about family and cuisine with Game of Thrones star Nikolai Koster-Waldau.
Chef Carsten (Nikolai Coster-Waldau) and his wife Maggie (Catherine Rosenthal) have been pursuing their cherished dream for many years - to open an expensive restaurant and get a Michelin star. On the way to success, their feelings for each other faded away, each plunged into their own affairs and chores. One evening, Maggie finds an anonymous note addressed to Carsten in a restaurant. It says that she is cheating on her husband. Although her affair with the chef Frederick (Charlie Gustafsson) is long in the past, guilt gnaws at the woman, she is afraid to let Carsten down, who is preparing to receive a Michelin specialist.
Dane Kristoffer Boe, known for his Cannes-awarded debut Reconstruction, has put a seemingly familiar story about a couple whose seemingly ideal family life has actually been bursting at the seams for a long time. A little "Madame Bovary", a little "Anna Karenina", "Taste of Hunger" is interesting primarily because of how it is filmed and how it presents a seemingly trivial plot. It's all about the purely Danish aesthetics that screenwriter Tobias Lindholm ("One More") and Lars von Trier's regular director of photography Manuel Alberto Claro provided the film.
The main theme of the film is suggested by its title. Chef Karsten has a wonderful ability to mix different ingredients to achieve exquisite taste. His life is a restaurant. Here he is the king and god - everything is subject only to him. But in pursuit of the coveted Michelin star Carsten forgot the recipe for his own relationship with his wife and children. From one feeling of longing and loneliness, his wife Maggie falls into the whirlpool of an affair with Frederick, a young and arrogant chef who managed to lend a helping hand to a woman in time and add a pinch of attention. But now Maggie is terribly sorry for what she had done, she is ashamed in front of her husband and children. And the terrible note she found in the restaurant burns her with memories that she so wanted to forget.
"Taste of Hunger" successfully mixes a story about the price of success, about how a career often ruins a family, with the theme of an all-consuming feeling of guilt that penetrates the very core of relationships. It excruciates Maggie to think that her and Carston's dreams of success could collapse because of her. But most interesting of all, this motive was solved through their daughter. The strongest dramatic moments of "Taste of Hunger" have to do with its perspective. The girl feels that she is to blame for the divorce of her parents. She is a true victim of her mother's shame and her father's desperate perfectionism.
The director Boe, like a good cook himself, successfully combines dramatic and sentimental scenes, inserting flashbacks in time to explain certain actions of the heroes. The duet of Coster-Waldau and Katrin Rosenthal was a success. The Game of Thrones star looks great in the image of a courageous and ambitious chef, who has everything falling out of his hands - family, restaurant, and even sour lemon gets into one of the dishes. But the main character is still Rosenthal, who shows a wide range of emotions on the screen, from love passion to complete despair. In addition, it is simply difficult to take your eyes off her.
Perhaps, there is only one claim to "Taste of Hunger". The film turned out to be too traditional and sometimes even in a Christian way. Fortunately, the authors still do not follow in the footsteps of Flaubert or Tolstoy and feel sorry for the heroine who cheated on her husband. But when in the finale the image of a large church appears over the family, it looks, to put it mildly, vulgar. If we make comparisons with food, then the film turned out to be tasty and rich, just the cook at some point went too far with salt.
This article was sponsored by Douglas Owen.
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