「The plot of this movie is obscure.」ポトフ　美食家と料理人　詠み人知らずさんの映画レビュー（感想・評価）

The director of this film, Trần Anh Hùng, received the Best Director Award in Canne Festival 2023, but the plot of this movie is obscure. It was reasonable to change the English title of the movie from 'The Pot-au-Feu' to 'The Taste of Things', since 'The Pot-au-Feu' is not the main subject of the movie, as I would mention below.
I very much enjoyed the initial 30 min of this movie. Dodin-Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) proposed the menu for the party of the colleagues: Consommé, Sole à la sauce hollandaise, Côte de veau rôtie, Omelette norvégienne (norwegian omlet), and behaved as a maître d'hôtel, and Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) was a perfect cuisinière. I really don't know they have a professional cooking lady in country side of France in 1885.
I, however, found that the essential role of Dodin-Bouffant has been altered, after Eugénie was suffered from an illness. He started to cook by himself for her. It is a little curious, since the model of 'Dodin-Bouffant' was Brillat-Savarin, who was an outstanding gastronomique at the age. Indeed, when Pauline, a young talented girl, would like to be an assistant of him, he initially said nobody can teach her in his kitchen, but ultimately he started to directly introduce her how to cook. Moreover, this long and a little tiring story was suddenly interrupted and ended by the dialogue between Dodin-Bouffant and Eugénie without further introduction of the initial subject of this movie, Pot-au-Feu. I have disappointed about this.
Overall, we enjoyed the each scene where they prepared each dishes, but the whole story was not much more than that. In particular, we should notice that doctors could not find the cause of her illness, although that is a critical point of the movie. We know that French critique only gave a low score to this movie, such as 3.1/5.0, therefore I am not so sure whether it is adequate or not that the director received the Best Director Award in Canne Festival 2023.