Mark Reviews Movies: A TASTE OF HUNGER

A Taste of Hunger, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 27, 2022

Maggie (Katrine Greis-Rosenthal) wants it all, she tells Carsten (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), the chef who will become her husband, during a flashback showing how the couple first met. After that, A Taste of Hunger gives us challenge after challenge and low after low for the two. If there was ever happiness here, we don't see it. Because the screenplay by director Christoffer Boe and Tobias Lindholm focuses on how professional and personal obstacles drive a deeper wedge between Maggie and Carsten, we don't feel it, either.

In theory, this is fine. If Maggie's desire to have everything in life—a marriage, a family, a career—is the dream, the rest of the story—the withering marriage and an affair, the juggling to take care of the kids, the feeling of being unappreciated in a business venture and the constant, daily struggle to keep that enterprise afloat—is the reality. There's a period for this couple—between the time they first meet and when we return to them at the first step of making that professional dream into something real—when they probably were happy and optimistic and full of love for each other (By the time the flashbacks catch up with their lives, the couple has two kids, so something had to be going right in some way).

The foundational problem for Boe's movie, perhaps, is that we never get a sense of that aspect and period of the relationship. As a result, there simply isn't much reason to care about this marriage as it stands now, filled with terrible communication and deception and negligence and simmering resentment. The movie's narrative is divided into chapters, named after the basic tastes, and in that regard, we get plenty of the sour and salty of this relationship—not too much of the sweet or, in terms of the story and the characters, the meat.

In addition to the chapter divisions, Boe and Lindholm divide the story between the present day, in which Maggie and Carsten are running a swanky restaurant in Copenhagen, and a series of episodes from the couple's past. In the now, Carsten gets word that a judge from the Michelin Guide, the publication that awards those coveted stars to restaurants, might have been at his restaurant.

While he and Maggie were distracted at sexual role-play at the bar and the bathroom (A sign, to be sure, of how things are going in that department), some bad food went out to customers. It's a potential disaster, and using her local restauranteur connections, Maggie heads out into the city, looking for the judge to explain—or bribe—her way to getting the restaurant a star. She's also trying to discover who sent Carsten a note, which she intercepted—and that says Maggie loves another man.

The present-day scenes provide a race against the clock, in terms of locating the judge, and a ticking time bomb, in regards to Carsten potentially discovering his wife's affair with Frederik (Charlie Gustafsson), a fellow chef and friend who helped Carsten get the restaurant into operation but has since moved on to his own gig. Frederik know nothing of the note, and whatever happened between him and Maggie didn't end well, if his outburst at his own work is any indication. Maggie keeps looking, and Carsten wallows in disappointment at home, as we await the seemingly inevitable misery that can come from that note.

The flashbacks aren't much help in offering a deeper understanding of these characters, this relationship, and the things that have come between them. After their flirty first meeting in the kitchen at party being held by Carsten's brother (played Nicolas Bro), those scenes from the past jump forward, with Maggie and Carsten married, having two kids, and preparing to open the restaurant.

Carsten has a bit of a temper, which is apparent already when he fires the cook who let the bad food be served. As the restaurant starts thriving, he starts to brush off his responsibilities at home and, generally, his wife. For her part, Maggie starts to appreciate Frederik's attention and gradually begins to rely on it—to the point that a phone call to her love is enough of a distraction that one of the kids ends up in peril.

The back-and-forth structure mainly serves to reveal details of back story, which aren't too revealing in the first. As a result, none of this rises above basic melodrama, except, perhaps, in the subdued performances from Greis-Rosenthal, who adds a quiet and understandable desperation to Maggie's race around the city, and Coster-Waldau (although his character is mostly ignored until the third act).

Manuel Alberto Claro's sometimes neon-infused cinematography is striking, if as superficial as the story, and since the tale revolves around cooking, there are appetizing moments of elegant food being prepared—if that means anything apart from the aesthetics. Where it really counts, though, A Taste of Hunger offers only a thin portrayal of a relationship on a continual downslide.

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