Product Description

Fun, sexy, and richly rewarding, THE TASTE OF OTHERS earned an Academy Award(R) nomination as Best Foreign Language Film (2000). The lives and loves of several completely opposite men and women artfully intersect in what becomes a delightfully funny web of romantic entanglements! While negotiating differences in wealth and status, style and taste, this vivid collection of characters mix and match in outrageously volatile combinations! Internationally acclaimed for its sexy comic sophistication -- expect the unexpected from this uncommonly entertaining motion picture!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29476 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-02-26
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 112 minutes

Amazon.com
"Funny, I never thought it would work. He's so different from me." Agnès Jaoui, scripting with her longtime writing and performing partner, Jean-Pierre Bacri, makes a deft directorial debut with this delightful romantic journey of missed opportunities and second chances. Bacri is poignant and piercing as a gauche petit-bourgeois businessman who discovers a world of art and magic missing from his empty, self-contained existence after he watches an emotionally devastating theater performance. Equal parts buffoon and born-again romantic, he fumbles through a new world and emerges as the soul of this story. Jaoui brings a light touch and a fresh perspective to familiar situations. Behind the comic characters and wry wit is a sympathy for her lonely souls and a celebration of the painful joy of their rediscovery of the possibilities of life. --Sean Axmaker

From The New Yorker
In the provincial city of Rouen, a married factory owner named Castella (Jean-Pierre Bacri) falls in love with a local actress after seeing her perform in a production of Racine's "Bérénice." The actress, Clara (Anne Alvaro), a refined, lonely woman, hangs out with the other actors and a few local artists-a closed bohemian circle-and is appalled by her wealthy admirer, who tells blundering, unfunny jokes. This pleASINgly observant and intelligent movie was written by Bacri and his partner, Agnès Jaoui, who directed the movie (plainly but effectively) and also appears in it as a free-living bar girl. Bacri and Jaoui are fascinated by manners in both the smaller and the larger sense: What holds a group of people together? What relationships make a happy life possible? The movie suggests that small groups united by taste may have their comforts, but without a sudden alteration of taste-sometimes called love-no true movement in life is possible. In French. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Life Imitates Art Imitates Life
THE TASTE OF OTHERS may not be for the taste of everyone, but for those who delight in the oh-so-French form of character examination, then this is a film for you. From the very beginning of the movie we feel as if we just dropped in on some French people who are having varying discussions that seem extemporaneous, loose and unrelated: nouveau riche businessman Castella (Jean-Pierre Bacri) discusses mundane notions with his clueless 'decorator' wife Beatrice (Brigitte Catillon); Castella's worldly bodyguard Bruno (Alain Chabat) passes the time with his rather boring buddy Franck (Gerard Lanvin); middle aged actress and English teacher Clara (Anne Alvaro) pines away at how her life in the arts is aimless; bartender Manie (director Agnes Jaoui) ponders why men are so fickle as lovers...you get the picture. But the beauty of this film is how the story interweaves these various isolated 21st Century people's lives and in doing so makes many valid comments on the importance of the arts in our lives, the power of 'opposites attract', the need for meaningful relationships to keep us on course, and the varied ways we all view our surroundings, our lives, depending on our individual vantages. Here is a film with wonderful acting, smart ideas well played out, and a musical score that is so varied and good that it is well worth a CD! But again, The Taste of Others will find its own audience depending on others tastes. In French with English subtitles.

Good Taste
This is one of my favorite 2002 movies (that's when it arrived in my town). Here is a movie that will surprise you, slowly subvert your expectations and (is it possible?) make you feel good. Ostensibly a movie about relationships, billed as a romantic comedy, it's really a meditation on a collision between the world of art and the world of the bourgeois. Can a businessman be moved to his soul by a moment of art? Can an artist who is sensitive and open to the world also be blind? Lot's of good acting, interesting characters, and a nice slice of contemporary French life. In French with subtitles but the DVD would have an English track.

for ADULTS only!
No, this film isn't remotely pornographic, not even a single delectable bare breast the whole two hours...can you believe that it's really a FRENCH relationship drama???

Well, aside from the lack of pleasantly gratuitous nudity that normally adorns most French films...YES. Here's why:

1. It's about 90% character-driven. There is something of a plot, but it exists mainly to give the characters something to do while unfolding to us who they really are...and refreshingly, there is zero judgement on the part of the film of any of the main characters. They simply are what they are.

2. There are no simplistic "good" vs. "bad" guys. Instead this film is populated with (gasp!) very believable and human characters who are just familiar enough to elicit the smiling "aha, they remind me of so-and-so!" mental balloon from the viewer, yet free of glib stereotyping so as not to bore us or insult our intelligence. (Read: the French film industry doesn't rely on focus groups to dumb down its movies for the lowest common denominator like Hollywood does.)

3. Sex is treated just as...well, sex. No stupid puritannical or moralistic hangups, no hypocritical voyeurism, no infantile romantic fairy tales. It's just something men and women do, whether for love or simple random pleasure, and whether it's two men or a men and a woman is completely irrelevant. OH MY GOD...this film is just sooooooooooo RADICAL!!!

Aside from those three simply earth-shakingly audacious qualities, this film just has a wonderfully mature, elegantly restrained manner which is almost unheard of these days. Yes the pacing is leisurely (like most French movies) are but never drags (unlike many), because the characters prove to be so deeply human and real not formulaic, so we can't help caring about what happens to them next.

I was especially stunned to find out that the actress who plays Manie, a sexy but subtlely (and irresistibly) spunky, solidly independent young woman who tends bar and deals hashish, is also the film's (first-time) DIRECTOR. Holy Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed and Elvis, I wanna move to Paris!