“A Taste of Hunger” (M) *** and a half

I ONCE considered earning a living by feeding folk. Sanity prevailed. Cheffing is not for amateurs.

I’ve said this before and I don’t mind saying it again; movies provide a great platform for expressing human sensitivities. But there are two basic human passions that movies don’t do well. Food and sex. Visual, tactile, olfactory temptations. Look. Yearn. Don’t expect to touch.

This Danish film serves the restaurant trade on a platter of hard realities. master-chef Carsten (Nikolaj Coster-Walda) and his wife Maggi (Katrine Greis-Rosenthal) are hungry for great food and even hungrier for a Michelin star to assure the success of their restaurant. 

Writer/director Christopher Boe’s film moves them to and fro through time and place in five tastes – sweet, sour, salt, fat and heat – from their sweet first meeting to a sour betrayal, and the heated climax when all of the elements combine. 

Is the mysterious gentleman who had dined alone in their restaurant a Michelin talent scout? Better treat him like one just in case. 

But something goes wrong with Carsten’s signature dish. Without that Michelin star, the restaurant will fail and they will lose everything. Maggi races off promising to somehow find the mystery solo diner, even though she has no idea who or where he is, to make him give them another chance.

Maggi has a second reason to panic. She has intercepted a message to Carsten telling him that his wife loves someone else. We go back in time to the Sour chapter to learn the origin of her affair. And the recipe for “A Taste of Hunger” goes from haute cuisine to merely cuisine. Pity. And what’s the signature dish? I won’t spoil it by telling you more than that it’s good fun.

At Palace Electric