France’s hope for a Best International Feature Oscar this year reside in “The Taste of Things,” a savory, exquisitely-acted immersion in The Pride of France — her cuisine — and a couple who make beautiful dishes together near the end of the 19th century.

The new film from Vietamese director Anh Hung Tran, who gave us “The Scent of Green Papaya,” is a feast for the senses and a romance as dry a glass of French muscadet. There are hints of “Babette’s Feast” and “Big Night,” and a less satisfying taste of “The Remains of the Day” in this love affair where two great cooks “converse with you in the dining room through what you eat,” and the invention and care they put into making it for each other, and us.

Oscar winner Juliette Binoche is Eugénie, queen of the kitchen, supervising helper and server Violette (Galatéa Bellugi) as she wades through each epic meal’s vast preparations. She passes through the garden, choosing cabbages and root vegetables with care. She waltzes through the kitchen with purpose, never a wasted motion, her requests and instructions spare and her mastery of every timeless cooking implement at her command effortless.

The viewer is left to marvel that she’s mixing sauces, brazing lettuce, adding layer after layer of complexity to broths and soups, meats and vegetables, courses and their many sauces (So much CREAM.) without a measuring spoon or measuring cup, and not a thermometer in sight.

We never see the fuel source to what looks like her wood stove. We’re too distracted by the steam, the smoke and imagining the aromas she is conjuring up in all those bowls, pots and pans to wonder how she does it.

Only after much prep and much cooking do we see the great chef Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) enter this busy workspace. He is not The Boss, not “supervising.” He is cooking, tasting, slicing, dicing, baking and stirring, in perfect sync and perfect harmony with Eugénie.

They have been doing this together, in his kitchen in his chateau, for “20 years,” we learn. After many of these culinary triumphs, shared with a quartet of his gastronome friends (Patrick d’Assumçao, Emmanuel Salinger, Frédéric Fisbach, Jan Hammenecker), he might humbly ask if she’ll leave her door “unlocked” tonight.

They are colleagues, near equals in the kitchen, with her almost certainly the better cook. They are also lovers — nothing formal, just two consenting adults taking their kitchen chemistry to the bedroom. We can see that he wants more, but that he has to broach that subject — “marriage” — with care. She is leery, fulfilled by the relationship they enjoy now.

Oh well, he jokes. As the wags all say (in French with English subtitles), “Marriage is a dinner that begins with dessert.”

Their meals together — she won’t eat with the grastronomes — are sweet, comfortable and familiar. But their cooking is where they best express their love. As they bond over their joint mentoring of a promising, culinarily precocious teen, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), their relationship is tested by his desire for more, and other impediments that suggest the wearing nature of their labor and the limits of this most indulgent of French cultural obsessions.

The cooking is meticulous, detailed and wide-ranging as we see what it takes to make Baked Alaska and Bourguignotte sauce, properly-prepared turbot and consumme and. Vol-au-vent. The food, mostly consumed by gastronome friends of the great chef Doldin is a sea of scenes with a little chat, a bit of food philosophizing and a lot of tinkling of silverware against porcelein and faint moans of ecstacy.

We see how one covers one’s head with a cloth napkin to savor the scent, the taste and the texture of perfectly-prepared Ortolans. Not that anyone should “perfectly” prepare Ortolan buntings for anything but bird watching.

Where “Taste” falls a bit short is in the romance of it all, the one-sided longing that Magimel gets across but which Binoche’s Eugénie can’t or won’t reciprocate. That sort of frustration can drive a melancholy romance like “The Remains of the Day.” Here, it’s flirted with but never overtly-expressed, the point of their connection is made, but not felt.

In Tran’s adaptation of Swiss writer Marcel Rouff’s novel, we’re meant to pick up on what is really in her heart and his by their food. Perhaps you have to be a French foodie to truly “get” that.

It’s still a marvelous and appetizing film. And even though there were raised eyebrows when “The Taste of Things” was selected by the French as their Oscar contender over the even drier, courtroom-bound divorce drama/mystery “Anatomy of a Fall,” I’d say the French picked the better film.

But for all the appetizers, the endless array of main courses and diabetic coma desserts we see dished-up here, Anh Hung Tran gives us a meal that is more overwhelming in its scope than wholly satisfying in its consumption.

Rating: PG-13, nudity

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Benoît Magimel, Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire, Patrick d’Assumçao, Emmanuel Salinger, Frédéric Fisbach, Jan Hammenecker and Galatéa Bellugi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Anh Hung Tran, based on the novel by Marcel Rouff. An IFC release.

Running time: 2:15