A Taste of Hunger – REVIEW
Image: A Taste of Hunger. Image: Henrik Ohsten
When you think about the title, it sounds ironic, clever, but then your realise it actually doesn’t make much sense. That describes this film. It begins very strongly but doesn’t quite live up to its promise – you taste a great film but are ultimately left hungry.
Christoffer Boe’s Danish culinary-themed film is quite beautiful to look at and the performances are all very good, but the plot suffers from lack of credibility and not enough character development to build empathy. It also doesn’t help that the narrative has been chopped and reassembled out of chronicle order making it difficult not only to follow but to get invested in.
Carsten (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Maggi (Katrine Greis-Rosenthal) have just opened their own haute cuisine restaurant in Denmark. Carsten is a master chef, Maggi is an astute, impartial critic of his creations. At the level at which they wish to operate it is imperative that they be awarded a Michelin star.
On the night an unexpected sole diner comes to eat at the restaurant, the kitchen is thrown into a frenzy – a person dining alone is typically the sign of a critic or potentially a Michelin inspector. The diner is inadvertently served over-fermented lemon in the restaurant’s signature dish. Though the diner is never confirmed to be a Michelin inspector, Carsten goes into a tailspin of anger and despair.
Maggi rushes out into the night in an ostensive attempt to find the inspector, but in reality, to confront the person who wrote a letter she intercepted that was meant for her husband. The letter informs her husband that she is having an affair.
The narrative jumps back and forth in time, filling in the details of the story. There are no real twists or surprises because there isn’t enough groundwork done to build the story or characters to any rigidity.
If anything, most of the elements are pretty cliched. The gorgeous dish preparation in the opening scene is never repeated with the same intricacy and so the film doesn’t even have the same food-porn allure that similar-themed films do.
★★½
In Cinemas October 13
