Le goût des autres (Agnès Jaoui, 2000)

Agnès Jaoui has this trick of treating the bleakest themes with the lightest of touches and the most sensitive of hands, stirring it airily from its dredges of depression until it puffs up like a beautiful, fluffy soufflé - think Comme une image (neglected, unattractive teenage daughter determinedly pursuing her singing ambitions despite unsupportive father etc etc etc) - so much potential for a cesspool of melodrama yet the film never loses its winning, effortless breeziness. Same for Jaoui's husband (ex?) and collaborator (ditto?) Jean-Pierre Bacri, who can take the most boorish, most insensitive Grumpy Old Man role and play it to the finest edge whereby it is just, but only just, about almost impossible not to like his character. No wonder the two put together produce such magic.

Goût is a film about changing lives: how its characters change their lives that were, respectively, bored, colourless, desperate, envious, lonely or superficial. Some succeed, some do not, and some whose end results we are left to guess. In Comme I could smile at the easy-going formula of the film - it is possible, after all, to have a sense of humour alongside ambition. But I found it alot harder to smile at Goût - changing lives is not a light, easy matter - it has repercussions, implications, consequences. It affects whole families, turns one's world upside down. It asks for prices so dear one cannot even begin to imagine until it is too late. It is not as simple a matter as (per Castella, Bacri's character) walking away from a marriage after falling in love with one's part-time English teacher once he sees her acting as Berenice in the theatre. This is flippant and almost offensive.

Save for the last scene: Bruno, Castella's driver, who constantly and forlornly practises blowing (and not very well) a rhythmic single note on his flute, which I took to signify his disconsolation (unfulfilling job, dumped by his girlfriend, meaningless flings with Manie who was pining for someone else). In the last scene, we see Bruno again, playing his single note, but only when the camera tracked past him to show a whole band ensemble all watching and listening to him did it come to me (but of course!) what that single-note rhythm was: the opening bars of "Non je ne regrette rien". And at that point, the whole band took up their instruments and launched into a gusty, gutsy rendition which then led to the credits. Everybody else was playing melodies and harmonies, while Bruno was still blowing his single notes, but now no longer pathetic, but now the stolid, rhythmic bass that is holding together the music.