Lê Bảo’s feature debut Vi, translated as Taste, follows the lives of four Vietnamese women and a Nigerian immigrant in Ho Chi Minh City as they perform menial labor and, for the span of several days, live together in an abandoned concrete building outside of the city where they cook, bathe, rest, ruminate. It is when the characters come together in the concrete building that the film culminates in its surreal, poetic density: a scene, a single image, seems to stand in for the memory of an event or a life’s worth of experience. Taste is nothing short of entrancing, effervescent—it’s reminds us that a film’s visual beauty can be absolutely arresting but difficult to put into words because words, ultimately, are not film’s primary medium.Taste presents two impressions of living: to live is to strive for what is possible, yet it is...
- 4/28/2021
- MUBI
The Vietnamese filmmaker Le Bao has already shown a considerable talent with his shorts, but after his feature debut “Taste” he seems destined to be regarded as one of the most promising auteurs of today and tomorrow. “Taste” premiered at Berlinale’s more daring and avant-garde competition programme Encounters where it was awarded with the Special Jury Prize. For a reason, since it is one of a kind gripping viewing experience.
Taste screened in Berlinale
The filmmaker demonstrates his sure hand right from the opening long take from a fixed position. An ageing local football coach puts the figurines resembling the over-sized chess pawns on a model of the pitch. The dressing room looks spartan, its walls are bare and the benches holding the complete team are simple. One face and one figure stands out from the rest of the crew: the African man credited as Bassley only in the...
Taste screened in Berlinale
The filmmaker demonstrates his sure hand right from the opening long take from a fixed position. An ageing local football coach puts the figurines resembling the over-sized chess pawns on a model of the pitch. The dressing room looks spartan, its walls are bare and the benches holding the complete team are simple. One face and one figure stands out from the rest of the crew: the African man credited as Bassley only in the...
- 3/12/2021
- by Marko Stojiljković
- AsianMoviePulse
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
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