He attributes his eye for aesthetics to his mother. Born into a working-class family, he says that “everything around me was quite ugly: the houses and the neighbourhood. The only place that was beautiful was the kitchen. When my mother came back from the market, she brought back vegetables, fruits and flowers. It was quite amazing for a child to see this, and I could have a wonderful meal after. Everything was about pleasure in my mother’s kitchen, and I first learnt about beauty there.”

Tran left his homeland with his family for Laos in 1967, before settling in Paris after the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 aged 12. But despite leaving at such a young age, he says, “My sensibility towards Vietnam was already fully formed when I left.” His connection to his birthplace only increased with age, and he chose to study at École nationale supérieure Louis- Lumière, a school of cinema, photography and sound, so that he could better share that bond he says. “What was important was when I went to school, it gave me the instruments to express [his feelings about Vietnam], to make it richer and more sophisticated.”

His studies exposed him to musicals and westerns, which he describes as genres with an emphasis on the “movement and expressiveness of the body. In westerns, everything is so physical: a character hits the other’s face, who then falls to the mud, and blood comes out of his mouth; it’s very powerful. Then there’s the opposite of it. Musicals express softness, sensuality and how, when a boy meets a girl, his feet start dancing to the music because this love inside him is so strong that it needs to come out of his body.”

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The influence of these genres can be seen in The Taste of Things. In the 38-minute opening scene, renowned gourmet Dodin Bouffant (Magimel), his cook Eugénie (Binoche) and their two young assistants move around the kitchen in a carefully choreographed dance of procedures to prepare the dishes, all captured with very complex camera movements. “It looks really like a ballet. I like long shots; I don’t cut or edit my shots. [In this film,] I like to give the audience the feeling of real time in the scene, and to give the feeling of harmony [between a couple] and a vague feeling of life, because harmony in films is quite rare,” Tran says. “In all my films, there is this feeling of musicality coming from the film. I’m not talking about the music that I use in the movie, but the movie as seen as a piece of music.”

Tran’s filmmaking has been experimental ever since his first release, the 1988 short film La Femme Mariée de Nam Xuong. Even though he has moved among genres over the years—drama, romance, musical, thriller, crime and action—he has often made avant-garde decisions, but they are always based on what’s necessary for his art. “One day, I shot one scene [for a] movie and just moved on to the next scene. The lead actor, who was also a filmmaker, asked me why I didn’t reshoot the same scene from another angle so that I would have different materials to work on in the editing room,” he recalls. Tran says he thought about it for a few minutes, but stood his ground. “If the one shot that I liked was the only way to express this scene, then there was no plan B.”

That moment upended Tran’s understanding of a lot of practices in the mainstream film industry. “A lot of movies today are shot with four or five cameras. By doing so, the directors have materials for the editor,” he says. “But that’s nonsense for me, because then it’s
an entertaining edit for the audience, and the film has no point of view.” Taste, for instance, experiences no shocks or unforeseen circumstances. The ending is a natural conclusion to all that comes before it. “I wanted the story to be very simple, so that people can only enjoy the humanity of the characters and how they behave with each other. This quality of being human is the most important thing for me.”

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This eye for subtle, simple, ordinary details could be seen as a western approach, and starkly different from the average Vietnamese filmmaker. But Tran maintains his vision even in productions about his birth country. “Something that’s mundane to locals can be very interesting to me, and I have to show it,” he says, mentioning bánh giò, a typical Vietnamese breakfast food of sticky rice and meat wrapped in a banana leaf, as an example. “When you finish eating it, the banana leaf is just trash to locals. But for me, the green leaf with white dots of sticky rice looks very beautiful. It’s like an abstract painting. I find a way to film it so that it can be touching to even a Vietnamese audience.”

He has never felt the need to present Vietnamese culture in the “authentic” way. “It’s not a question of authenticity or not. It is [about] your emotions. If you bring your emotions to people, you have to find the right way to do it,” he explains. “I’m not making documentaries about Vietnam. I’m making fiction, and this fiction is more about my feelings about Vietnam and everything I received from it. It’s my duty to express exactly what I see in Vietnam.”

He is even forgiving of Hollywood’s representations of Vietnam. “[American director Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 war film] Apocalypse Now is a great movie about the Vietnam War; [American director Michael Cimino’s 1978 war-related drama] The Deer Hunter also—but in some scenes in The Deer Hunter, we can see that the director doesn’t know how Vietnamese behave really,” he says. “But it’s not a problem. I can put that aside and appreciate the movie and what it has to say.”

Like many before him, Tran hopes to make a film about the Vietnam War some day, but he hopes to tell the story from the point of view of Vietnamese soldiers, whom he feels haven’t received much of the spotlight. “There is this very good book written by a Vietnamese soldier who, after the war, recounts how he became like a wild animal after seeing his friends being killed next to him,” he says. But that plan will have to be put on hold: “There is heavy censorship in Vietnam, and this vision of a Vietnamese soldier during the war is not what the authorities would like people to know about.”

In the meantime, the director has set himself up for another challenge. “I would like to make a movie about Buddha because his philosophy is quite complex, and it’s difficult to make it understandable for the audience,” he says. He has been part of a Buddhism study group for six months; after the Oscars this month, he plans to travel the world to meet monks. But more than just a journey to discover more about Buddhism, the trip will be a pilgrimage for Tran to find a new film language: he hopes to return to what he calls a “more primitive filmmaking style to make a movie that has a certain innocence in the picture. I don’t know how to do it just yet.”

Not that “not knowing” has stopped Tran from trying something. “By the way, like how I don’t cook and made Taste, for this new film; I’m not religious at all.”

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