Taste

Lê Bảo’s rich film reaches further back too, beyond the politics of globalization and migration, beyond even culture, into a pre-ethnographic past, to see us as trapped animals, paradoxically dehumanized by the sunless concrete ugliness of human civilization.

Taste is a lot more than the sum of its influences. The strange, disquieting world Lê beckons us into is entirely his making, and it brims with spell-binding images.

There’s something here. It’s just undercooked. The cinematic philosophy around these minimalist hallucinations comes down to whether the images ought to amount to anything, as they always do with Weerasethakul and almost always with Reygadas.

The enigmatic proceedings soon find an oneiric, hypnotic rhythm that some viewers may indeed find entrancing.