This was the freshest batch of bread, then you took a slice and saw a green dot and you thought of its minute finger burrowing through to its heel.
This was a red and juicy strawberry, scarlet red and shiny, but it turned to mush in your mouth and left the sour taste of gone off wine.
This cheese held such promise: once firm now crumbling like the ancient marble of a Roman ruin. How can it taste of nothing?
But we keep going back, endlessly hungry, we keep going back.
You want to be somebody else. You are cycling through the city, it is dark but not late and gentle dregs of humanity cross your path as you head towards the canal on your bike. You don’t want to be somebody else because you are unhappy with who you are: who you are is evanescent; who you are has flown into ether in good company and fine spirits. You are so confident in who you are that you could shed it like a tunic made of silk: you could drop your whoyouaredness as easily, knowing that it would still be there in a few hours for you to pick it up and lightly put it back on.
You want to be somebody else. Specifically you want to be a couple in their late fifties walking down Leeson Street with their arms wrapped around each other’s waist. You want to be him as much as you want to be her, as much as you want to be both simultaneously. You want their ease and warmth, of course. You very much want to find out where it comes from: whether it has been earned through a steady life together, or whether it has dropped from the sky like an unforeseen catastrophe. You want to know whether they are holding each other to prop each other up or not to sink deeper. You even want to wear their indistinct high street clothing all greys and blacks and earthy browns; all really not caring for or expecting any fresh eyes to fall on their bodies.
And then, with the subtle autumn chill that tiptoes the edges of the canal, as you leave them behind, you realise that what you want is a shadow of what you had once: as a child holding your mother’s hand; as a teenager lost in the pages of a novel; as a newly wed believing in some endless wedding waltz. It is autumn and what you want to become tastes like a chestnut: earthy and hard to get to. And it has the flavour of a chestnut–the flavour of a welcome winter.
2: Uncertainty: Seconds, minutes, hours, buzz like uninterrupted static leaving the taste of copper in your mouth. Here food is like punctuation: time is a long paragraph that needs to be chiseled. A bite of a carrot becomes a comma; a square of chocolate, a semi-colon; a glass of wine, a colon. Of course, you are waiting for the full stop, but you know that the full stop is never food. The full stop is someone’s face, someone’s voice.
Rome, 1st century BC, a slave, topless and barelegged, stands knee deep in a bath behind his master who is sitting with his back to him, completely naked. The light lathers their bodies in a bronze that compliments their tan complexions. Addressing his slave, the master proceeds to interrogate him about his habits and morals, does he lie? Does he steal? Has he ever dishonoured the gods? To all of these question the slave replies no. The questions are a form of foreplay, a series of appetizers preparing the ground for the main course, “Do you eat oysters?” the master asks; to which the slave replies that he does whenever he can. “Do you eat snails?” the master continues. “No, master.” The young slave replies. “Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral, and the eating of snails to be immoral?” Thus runs one of the most explicitly coded homoerotic encounters in the history of cinema courtesy of Stanley Kubrick’s direction, Dalton Trumbo’s script, and Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis’s performances in, you guessed it, Spartacus.
Abdellatif Kechiche fishes in similar waters in his provocative, intense and explicitly homoerotic Blue Is the Warmest Color by having the assured artist Emma tease her young and more inexperienced lover Adèle about the latter’s dislike of oysters, which Emma relishes both literally and as coded female genitalia. In the scene, the two leads are lying on the grass side by side, fully dressed, so absorbed in each other they may as well be an island slowly drifting away under the sun. Delight and a subtle flash of embarrassment cross Adèle Exarchopoulos face in yet another of the myriad close ups that constitute Kechiche’s film. It may not be the film’s subtlest moment, coming in the wake of Trumbo’s daring defiance of 1950s scruples but, the universe of adoration and intimacy in the young actress’s lovely face will touch anybody lucky enough to have experienced requited love. By the end of the scene Adèle is ready to enter the threshold of a new world that will devour her and spit her out forever transformed. She is now ready to taste oysters.
However invested in his lesbian love story (and invested he is), Kechiche’s film is ultimately a character study; a sort of sentimental education for a young working class woman who begins the film wading the troubling waters of her sexual awakening and finishes it almost drowning in them. Blue Is the Warmest Color is a long film, running at almost three hours, and it is exhausting in its uncompromising refusal to breathe for air as it inhabits young Adèle’s development; in that sense, it is utterly novelistic and Kechiche acknowledges that his protagonist must be measured not only in terms of an inner consciousness that is beginning to assert itself, but also against a milieu that is at odds with her passion and, as Kubrick would have it, her taste. For that reason, Kechiche has found in his oysters not just a metaphor for sex between women but also a class signifier, which he deftly uses in a scene that brings the young women for dinner to Emma’s house. Emma’s mother and her partner are bohemian, comfortably off but-unshowy in their tastes; they buy art and display it on the walls, they are discerning and adventurous in their search of white wine, they know Emma is gay and they receive Adèle with open arms and a batch of fresh oysters. The scene is lit in subdued muted gold reminiscent of candlelight; Emma’s mother, warm but inquisitive, tries to disguise her incomprehension about Adèle’s modest and pragmatic ambition to become a primary school teacher. Adèle overcomes her scruples and swallows the oysters that used to disgust her. She has crossed the line that separates her from the worldlier Emma, even if momentarily.
Kechiche sustains his use of food as a class signifier in a mirror dinner scene staged in Adèle’s house. Here Emma is not a lover, but a friend helping Adèle improve her results in Philosophy. Oysters are not on the menu, spaghetti Bolognese –a male and working class coded dish in cinema (not incidentally is it frequently on the menu in Mafia films heavily invested in depictions of masculinity)– have been cooked by Adèle’s father. In this environment, where earning one’s crust is paramount, Emma’s metier is questioned as impractical. She, like Adèle before her, is willing to enter her lover’s world on its own terms, adopting a heterosexual mask and toning down her bohemian streak to please her girlfriend’s parents. Léa Seydoux smiles as she absorbs the spaghetti that run under the charming gap between her teeth. She is more knowing than Adèle and it shows on her face. Kechiche once again proves that he is a great director of character: action and expression meet through the consumption of food. Dinner tables have always been pregnant with silenced truths in classic drama and this scene is a fine addition to that tradition.
Elsewhere Kechiche and co-script writer Ghalia Lacroix prove that it is impossible to write about love without writing about food. I won’t tell you any more. Go see the film and have some food before you sit down for its three-hour run. Be careful not to overeat though: Blue Is the Warmest Color proves that oysters can be far more (ful)filling than spaghetti.
I must confess I don’t know real hunger. The closest I have come to it was when I went without food for a day and a half when I was in my late teens. As a privileged Westerner, my experience of hunger, if not voluntary, was, by an accident of my own making, my responsibility. It was the product of mismanagement and its effects were so negligible that it has become part of my repertoire of anecdotes. I tell it when I want to illustrate my more improvident wilder years: the years before I learnt a modicum of husbandry. One and a half days of hunger: a pair of closed brackets in a very long text.
Because I don’t know real huger, the closest I have come to suffering through my stomach was losing my appetite. Hunger has no face; the loss of appetite always wears somebody’s mask. If you close your eyes and you think of the times you could not eat, the times when food was an unwelcome visitor in your mouth, you will see a face. You may be in love or you may be heartbroken. Love and heartbreak are next-door neighbours: sit on one’s fence; fall in the other’s garden. The person that made you lose your appetite because their existence was enough to sate you is the only person that will hollow your stomach through grief. Beware of that face, it is only so long you can survive on an empty stomach.
A Fistful of Olives 