You can love French movies all you want, but to enjoy “The Taste of Things,” you really have to love French food at its most fatty and gross.

The movie begins with a 15-minute scene of people cooking. Benoît Magimel plays a famous chef, and Juliette Binoche is his cook, and they are preparing a lavish meal. To some degree it’s fascinating to watch Binoche, whose kitchen demeanor is pacific and unflappable, but the main attraction is intended to be the succession of dishes that she is preparing.

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To many, these dishes — largely meat and fish extravaganzas — will look succulent, but I’m not a fan of French cuisine, and to me most of it looked like carnage, like parts of dead animals smothered in sauce. Bone marrow soup? Mmm, yummy.

The food looks unhealthy in the extreme, a series of heart attacks on a plate, and this impression is in no way lessened by the appearance of Magimel, whose complexion looks ruddy and mottled and who huffs and puffs just to get across the room. And Binoche plays a woman who keeps fainting. By chance, might her troubles in maintaining consciousness have something to do with the fat-larded food that she is eating? Is it possible that six meat courses per day is one too many — or five or six too many?

So “The Taste of Things” is like a dance movie with bad dance numbers, or a musical with lousy songs, because the whole point is for you to revel in the cooking, and the cooking looks mildly revolting. Everything else about the movie is fine, and some of it’s lovely and heartfelt, but sooner or later, every road leads to the kitchen.

Based on the 1924 novel by Marcel Rouff, “The Life and Passion of Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet,” “The Taste of Things” is the story of two people, Dodin (Magimel) and Eugenie (Binoche), who’ve been preparing meals together for over 20 years. Their relationship is romantic, as well, but constrained. He wants to get married, but she is happy with the current arrangement. They live under the same roof but sleep separately. When he feels amorous, he has permission to slip into her room, unless her door is locked. If it’s locked, he must go back to his own room and hope for better luck next time.

The movie takes place in the late 19th century and finds the characters at a stage in life at which they’re realizing that they’re more than halfway through. There’s a sense of poignancy about the preciousness of time and the passing of the seasons, all somehow made more intense by the sheer beauty of the French countryside. Meals are temporary, and so are seasons and relationships and lives. Somehow director Tran Anh Hung taps into the sweetness and sadness of that.

Still there’s no getting around that this is a 135-minute movie with lots of scenes of people either cooking or eating. If you have to watch someone cooking or eating, Juliette Binoche is as good a choice as any, but even she can’t make scintillating entertainment out of chewing, stirring a pot and putting on oven mitts.

The movie also feels like an old idea, a product of the late 20th century foodgasm movie fad that produced those classics, “Babette’s Feast” (1987) and “Like Water for Chocolate” (1992). But at least if you see this movie, you’ll find out that the dessert we call “Baked Alaska” is known as a “Norwegian omelet” in France. 

Reach Mick LaSalle: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com