As a filmmaker, you’ve often depicted cooking as a love language. From where does this interest originate? I think that it comes from my childhood, and from my mother. My parents were workers, and we were not rich. The place where I lived, in a remote town in the center of Vietnam, was very ugly; … Read more
Through this scene, where nobody says anything beyond “Put the veal in the oven”, we piece together the relationships. It’s so gratifying to get to know characters by watching what they do (as opposed to listen to them talk about themselves). An amazing amount of information is conveyed without dialogue. There’s Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), … Read more
Written and directed by Jackson, “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” is a poetic memoir of Mack’s life. Memories will appear one after another from her youngest days to her gray-haired years, non-sequentially, creating a winding road that bobs and weaves through mundane and life-defining moments alike. A death, a birth, first kiss, youthful misadventures, … Read more
Something that I really loved about the film is just how tactile and textural it is. Like the scene during the funeral when they’re in their grandma’s car. I felt like I was in their car. I felt like I could smell that car. How did you capture those textures? At every level I was … Read more
Happily, Kaurismaki’s filmmaking skills have not slackened in the interim. While not quite as bleak as those earlier movies, he does an intriguing job of taking classic rom-com tropes and finding new ways of approaching them. The deadpan style of humor he has always favored ends up fitting in nicely with the romance that he … Read more