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A MATTER OF TASTE Send This Review to a Friend
This film is a strange one in a way that only a French film can manage. The screenplay by Gilles Taurand and Bernard Rapp, with Rapp directing, spins an offbeat tale of an egotistical, bizarre businessman who hires and handsomely pays a young waiter to become his food taster. What the employer is really after is someone who can be as closely like him as possible, an alter ego merging into one and a person whom he can utterly control and make demands upon at his whim. It is a story of power and class and the seductiveness of money. You know it has to end badly.
The acting is on a superior level, with Benard Giraudeau playing the businessman Frederic Delamont with an evil charm and Jean-Pierre Lorit imparting an innocence to the role of the employee, Nicolas Riviere, who is in way over his head in this exploitative relationship. Florence Thomassin is also excellent as Beatrice, Nicolas's down-to-earth girlfriend, who recognizes the dangers from her principled position against prostituting oneself for financial gain. She implores Nicolas to turn away from this destructive, humiliating job. She wants a simple life that can be lived with dignity; riches do not impress her.
Director Rapp infuses the film with a weird mystique in developing the oddball story as Nicolas is entrapped in the tightening web of psychological domination. The problem is that as the drama inches toward its climax the film becomes too nutty to be taken seriously and the ending is as much of an anti-climax as it is a relief. It is clumsily telegraphed with the sight of a weapon that you know must be used at some point. All that's left is to speculate how and when and on whom. An Attitude Films release.
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