Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

This odd-couple ensemble comedy was reportedly inspired by "Hannah and Her Sisters," but in this case co-writers Jean-Pierre Bacri and Agnès Jaoui are working on a bigger canvas with a broader brush. Instead of those wrapped-too-tight Manhattanites and their 85-room apartments (very common in NYC), we get a dufus businessman's Norman cottage done up in Late Laura Ashley and the tiny "piaules" where a cute waitress (Jaoui, who also directed) cooks pasta for her boyfriends and deals a little hash or, as the case might be, a lovelorn chauffeur practises his flute. As the title suggests, there's an element of culture clash—M. Castella, the businessman (Bacri), is blown away by an actress's performance in a Racine tragedy ("Crap, it's poetry!," he grumbles as the play begins), but she can't get too interested, at least in principle, in a guy who tells peepee-caca jokes and confuses "Rigoletto" with the Juanita Banana jingle (she doesn't even know about the Danielle Steele thing…). And as with Woody, the script does pander a bit—M. Castella finally gets it right when he buys an opera CD and, to atone for an antigay slur at a gallery opening, an abstract painting that clashes with his wife's decor. Likewise, there's a funny moment when M. Castella's tough-guy bodyguard, Frank, exercises his droit de coolest guy in the room (trying hard to avoid a spoiler here), but it's the flute-playing chauffeur, Bruno, who turns out to be the better man. I'm not sure there are too many life lessons for us here, but "The Taste of Others" is lively and involving from start to finish; the dialogue is sharp and slangy, and if you learned French in high school, you may pick up some useful new words. Available on disk from Netflix.

I speak French and lived in Rouen (where the movie was filmed) for a year. I watch French films almost to the exclusion of other genres. I figure one needs to watch about 10 French films to find at least one of value. This is not the one. I have never ended a film before it was over but pulled this one out of the DVD player after about 45 minutes. The characters were perhaps a bit more believable than the ones in "La Potiche" but not by much. The situations weren't much more believable than the characters and the film in general is depressing and slow. I avoid action/3-D films and generally search out films of a more mundane and life-like quality but couldn't find those qualities in this picture. I even survived watching "La moustache" the whole way through but couldn't take this one. Ugghhh...

Or this is how I saw it, eventually. Like Angelique, I'm someone who imposes their taste on others, so it took me a while to catch on. For the first half, I thought this movie was about infidelity, which it isn't really.Someone you thought was a boor can suddenly become a lot more appealing when someone else finds them attractive. It isn't just that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. It's that others see different things in people.I have a friend who can transform music for me, just by liking it herself. Music that is 'not my taste' comes alive when she says she likes it. Suddenly I become the person with a certain taste to the person with no taste.This is exactly what happens to characters in this movie. Castella is the pivot around which the various characters of this movie turn. He presents as a tactless embarrassment, a nouveau rich (please excuse my French) who travels with a bodyguard, Bruno. Castella doesn't care if Bruno is bored or not; it's his job. And there are other characters. The ones who have the farthest to fall when Castella passes through their lives are those who are quite sure their taste is far superior to his.Funny, subtle, very watchable, and I learnt from it.

This is a wonderful film and I found the way that it deals with the issue of taste very appealing.Castella is portrayed as a 'philistine', without taste as it were. This is a bigger thing in France than here in Austrlia, and the French language equivalent of the phrase 'bad taste' which is 'de mauvais gout' is to be avoided. Although in Australia we love to laugh at Kath & Kim, and 'The Castle', which represents bad taste to us.The thing is, some people seem to act like taste is a matter of 'breeding' and education. For example you may currently line your shelves with Toby mugs, and have personalised numberplate's, but with a little (or a lot depending on how little 'breeding' you have) education you are not beyond an appreciation of the maxim "less is more".However this film shows that while Castella maybe seen as uncouth, in the way that he would prefer Pro Hart to Sidney Nolan, Robert G. Barrett to Peter Carey, these loves are his loves, and he should not also be seen as 'thick' because of them. Or perhaps the elements of pop culture (or even kitsch culture) have the same intrinsic value, as those of high culture.I personally found it a more enjoyable film because of this element to the story.