by Levan Tskhovrebadze
Emerging Vietnamese director Le Bao deploys eccentric and phantasmagorical images with austere tones and somber visuals in his debut feature “Taste”. With a stoically constructed atmosphere, he creates a monumental cinematic mood, much like the Portuguese iconic auteur Pedro Costa depicting physically distorted bodies of working-class people.
If there is such a definition as Kafkaesque, we should also refer to Costa-esque, as the world of the Portuguese director is exceptionally autonomous. In Kafka’s literary orbit, you encounter powerless human beings in absurdist labyrinths of bureaucratic machines while with Costa, spectators examine the existence of weakened individuals in the monstrous web of everyday life. The Vietnamese director manifests a Costa-esque style, but in more stylized, ambiguous and surreal manner.
Nigerian football player Bassley (Olegunleko Ezekiel Gbenga) is neglected by his Vietnamese team and moves in with four local, working-class women in the city slums. From the beginning,...
Emerging Vietnamese director Le Bao deploys eccentric and phantasmagorical images with austere tones and somber visuals in his debut feature “Taste”. With a stoically constructed atmosphere, he creates a monumental cinematic mood, much like the Portuguese iconic auteur Pedro Costa depicting physically distorted bodies of working-class people.
If there is such a definition as Kafkaesque, we should also refer to Costa-esque, as the world of the Portuguese director is exceptionally autonomous. In Kafka’s literary orbit, you encounter powerless human beings in absurdist labyrinths of bureaucratic machines while with Costa, spectators examine the existence of weakened individuals in the monstrous web of everyday life. The Vietnamese director manifests a Costa-esque style, but in more stylized, ambiguous and surreal manner.
Nigerian football player Bassley (Olegunleko Ezekiel Gbenga) is neglected by his Vietnamese team and moves in with four local, working-class women in the city slums. From the beginning,...
- 8/29/2022
- by Guest Writer
- AsianMoviePulse
In the limbo between waking and sleeping — a state deliberately induced by Vietnamese director Lê Bảo’s striking feature debut — the framework that allows you to judge dream from nightmare is absent. And anyway, how many of our reveries can be so easily classified as one or the other? “Taste” (the name itself a strange tease for a film that despite its opacity is sensuously preoccupied with food and flesh) is defiantly dreamlike, submerging a barely-there plot into an aesthetic so arresting it becomes the story. Nothing much happens inside its 97 minutes, but take any single one of its frames, and everything is happening inside that.
Inasmuch as it is has a narrative, here it is: A Nigerian footballer (Olegunleko Ezekiel Gbenga), who left his 9-year-old son to come to Saigon as a player, is dropped from the team when injured. He works now as a barber and lives...
Inasmuch as it is has a narrative, here it is: A Nigerian footballer (Olegunleko Ezekiel Gbenga), who left his 9-year-old son to come to Saigon as a player, is dropped from the team when injured. He works now as a barber and lives...
- 3/9/2021
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Lê Bảo’s Taste is set in Saigon, but for the best part of its 97 minutes, all action is confined to a bunker-like abode where five people meet and hide. The place is dark, unfurnished, and dank; so spectral in its emptiness you’d wonder if the quiet tenants are alive or ghosts. In the stunning chiaroscuro of their unlikely home all motion slows into choreography, characters freeze in a state of protracted wait, and there seems to be only a very blurred distinction between the dreaming and the dead.
Premiering in the Berlinale Encounters sidebar, Taste marks Lê’s feature debut. It is a film yanked out of a dream, and it behaves as one. Strictly speaking, it isn’t a story that’s being told here, but a mosaic of oneiric images, conjured and arranged around a tale of longing. The plot, thin and evanescent as it is,...
Premiering in the Berlinale Encounters sidebar, Taste marks Lê’s feature debut. It is a film yanked out of a dream, and it behaves as one. Strictly speaking, it isn’t a story that’s being told here, but a mosaic of oneiric images, conjured and arranged around a tale of longing. The plot, thin and evanescent as it is,...
- 3/5/2021
- by Leonardo Goi
- The Film Stage
Lê Bảo’s debut feature, Taste, is a stark marvel of oblique storytelling and some pretty wondrous imagery. It tells the story of Bassley (Olegunleko Ezekiel Gbenga), a Nigerian immigrant in Ho Chi Minh City who, upon losing his contract as a soccer player, takes up a tenuous, marginal existence with a group of four female factory workers. The group partly inhabits an abandoned industrial building, with some trips to the slummy huts that jut on the water, and embarks on long, ritualistic bouts of fragrant cooking.Taste is an exquisitely quiet film, often told through silent, arresting tableaux. But in one of the rare scenes where Bassley speaks, we learn that he’s lost his father, and that his own small son—whom we watch in a gorgeous scene in which father and son mimic each other eating a watermelon—can only see one another through videos, played on an old screen.
- 3/1/2021
- MUBI
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.