A Taste of Hunger

* * * M - Drama/Romance - 1h 40m - Danish

A couple who sacrifice everything to achieve the highest possible accolade in the culinary world - a Michelin star.

A power couple within the Danish gourmet scene run the popular restaurant Malus in Copenhagen. The couple is willing to sacrifice everything to achieve their dream -- getting the coveted Michelin star.

Stars: Katrine Greis-Rosenthal Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Flora Augusta

Release date: 13 October 2022 (Australia)

Official Trailer

78% TOMATOMETER
0% AUDIENCE SCORE

Review

Review by SANDRA HALL | TheAge

The opening scene of this Danish film is all about food as theatre. Carsten (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau ) and his wife Maggie (Katrine Greis-Rosenthal ) are setting the stage for the opening of their new restaurant.

Most of the room will be in darkness with each dish sitting in its own pool of light. We're in the world of the celebrity chef here and food is centre stage. Carsten is running an establishment inspired by Copenhagen's famed Noma but he has also trained in Japan returning with a fervent belief in the potential of the culinary art as a cross between performance art and religious experience.

Maggie becomes his co-worshipper and during the early years of their marriage their shared desire to see their restaurant succeed serves as the aphrodisiac that sparks their sex life. Then Carsten's urge to attain a Michelin star starts eclipsing everything else in his life. We know the marriage is in trouble when he has a meltdown because his young daughter spills the vinaigrette before it can be added to the salad at a family barbecue.

Director Christoffer Boe and his cowriter Tobias Lindholm who has collaborated with Thomas Vinterberg one of Danish filmmaking's great success stories adroitly interweave the complications of Carsten and Maggie's fractured love story with the politics of Denmark's culinary scene although their fondness for flashbacks does require concentration.

The action moves back and forth between past and present with great frequency but it's not hard to orientate yourself once you've learnt the signals to look for and Coster-Waldau and Greis-Rosenthal certainly make an attractive couple. Their relationship reaches crisis point when Maggie has a health scare only to find Carsten can't be diverted from a drama in the restaurant's kitchen long enough to fear the possibility his wife may be in mortal danger.

In other words Carsten is turning into a monster which makes Maggie's short-lived affair with another chef perfectly understandable but because of the juxtaposition of past and present we're repeatedly reminded of what they had together. And there is the fact Coster-Waldau has so much charm that it's quite difficult to write him off as a lost cause.

Some of the plot twists are just too contrived to be true. I wasn't convinced by the ending which is dubious on a couple of counts but all up it's an intimate and absorbing analysis of a marriage brought to breaking point by the pressure of a shared ambition gone sour.