It would be a reach to claim any acute topical relevance in the quietly stunning Vietnamese title “Taste,” which took a Special Jury Prize in the festival program’s Encounters sidebar. The director Le Bao’s arresting debut is a largely wordless depiction of a Nigerian footballer who lives, cooks and occasionally couples with four Vietnamese women in an eerily stripped-back Saigon tenement. At the end of “Taste” a tiny rodent sticks its quivering nose out of a mouse hole, before retreating back within. Which leads me to those Berlin titles that are the opposite of brash, that beguiled me instead with their smallness — a quality flattered by the intimacy of online home viewing. And feature films don’t come much smaller than “Introduction,” the latest miniature by the South Korean auteur darling Hong Sang-soo.

Source: International New York Times March 05, 2021 17:37 UTC