Une Affaire de gout (2000) **

Directed by Bernard Rapp. With Bernard Giraudeau, Jean-Pierre Lorit and Florence Thomassin. Quite a deceptive (though not necessarily disappointing) French drama about an excentric billionaire and his personal food taster. It begins like an “ethnic cuisine” flick, full of tasty dishes, crafted napkins, and snotty connaiseurs whose self-assured demeanor makes you feel awfully unimportant. But then, the film suddenly becomes a highly-charged psycho-drama about the Freudian (and not-so-Freudian) concepts of doppelganger, transfer of personality and plain insanity. Interesting, but hokey.