Une affaire de goût [A Matter of Taste] *** (2000, Bernard Giraudeau, Jean-Pierre Lorit, Charles Berling, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Florence Thomassin) – Classic Movie Review 13,683

The 2000 French film Une affaire de goût [A Matter of Taste] is a clever and creepy tale of a wealthy middle-aged businessman manipulator and a poor charming younger man manipulated.

A Matter of Taste is a French film directed by Bernard Rapp, released in 2000, a perfectly symmetrical tale of a middle-aged male manipulator (Bernard Giraudeau) and a younger man (Jean-Pierre Lorit) manipulated, one rich and one poor. The story features two handsome, narcissistic characters, one perverse, the other complicit, who are each the mirror of the other, leading to their destruction.

The film follows Frédéric Delamont (Bernard Giraudeau), a wealthy, eccentric and phobic industrialist, who meets a young temporary restaurant waiter, Nicolas Rivière (Jean-Pierre Lorit), by chance at lunch. A few days later, Delamont offers Nicolas the lucrative position of his personal food taster and then moulds him according to his wishes. This distinctly unusual and unhealthy professional relationship starts from burgeoning mutual admiration and then trust, but spirals into a dangerous game of deception and obsession for both men. The plot runs in flashback from the police investigation into Frédéric’s murder, and the psychological interrogations of the doctors taking care of Nicolas after killing him.

The film is adapted by Bernard Rapp and Gilles Taurand in an excellent screenplay running smoothly and stylishly from the novel Goûter n’est pas jouer by Philippe Balland.

A Matter of Taste is a brilliantly clever, beautifully honed and oh-so-creepy, deeply nasty, pervy semi-thriller, so disturbing you want go and have a shower immediately after to wash it all off. It doesn’t make any real sense as a realistic thriller. It doesn’t intend to. It’s an ambiguous, arty parable, mesmerising watchable though. The parable is, if you manipulate or allow yourself to be manipulated, you’re in big fat trouble. Yep, we get it.

It is a slight shame that they don’t want the outcome to be any kind of surprise, with the interspersed interviews giving the whole game away, so its inevitability makes the conclusion feels like an obvious letdown rather than being satisfying. The doom of both manipulator and manipulated is spelled out from the start. We simply have to sit and watch appalled and fascinated as it plays out. So it’s no whodunit. It’s an emotional horror story actually.

We are supposed to believe that neither man is gay, by the way. It’s merely a power game, not, at least overtly, a sexual one. It plays out in an exotic, decadent world great food and wine, and eroticism. Hmmm.

Bernard Giraudeau and Jean-Pierre Lorit are tremendous, bringing it a breath of life, stale though their characters’ breaths are. Florence Thomassin is excellent in the unforgiving role of Lorit’s girlfriend. All three main performances are outstanding, It is also great to see Jean-Pierre Léaud as the investigating magistrate, though he is rather wasted with not enough to do, nothing special for him.

It is a beautiful looking film, with a real surface gleam, classy, posh and lavish.

Its five César Award nominations, including Best Film, failed to turn into any wins.

© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,683

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