LOS ANGELES – Oscar winner Juliette Binoche was thrilled when she was cast in the romantic drama The Taste Of Things.

But the last person the French actress expected to play her love interest was her former husband, Benoit Magimel, an acclaimed French actor she divorced 20 years ago.

Opening in Singapore cinemas on March 21, the French-language film follows gifted cook Eugenie (Binoche) and her employer Dodin (Magimel), a famous gourmet.

It earned writer-director Tran Anh Hung the Best Director gong at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and made it onto the shortlist for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Oscars.

Set on a French country estate in 1889, the story revolves around the glorious dishes the pair create together and the slow-simmering romance that develops between them over two decades.

Binoche, 60, and Magimel, 49, were married from 1998 to 2003 and have a 24-year-old daughter.

But they had not seen each other much since their 2003 split, Binoche reveals at a screening in Los Angeles earlier in 2024.

Hung – a 61-year-old Vietnamese-French film-maker whose drama The Scent Of Green Papaya (1993) was Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Film – saw similarities between Binoche and Magimel and the characters he wanted them to play.

“In the story, they’ve been living together for 20 years, and I happened to have known Benoit for a little more than 20 years,” says Binoche, who won an Oscar for The English Patient (1996) and France’s equivalent award, the Cesar, for the drama Three Colours: Blue (1993).

She and Magimel first met when they filmed Children Of The Century (1999), a biographical drama in which they played George Sand (Binoche) and Alfred de Musset (Magimel), two French literary icons who have a love affair.

But after their five-year marriage ended in divorce, the couple did not have much contact and were not exactly on the best terms.

“So when (Hung) proposed this film to Benoit, I was very surprised he said yes because I thought he would never want to work with me again.

“We separated a long time ago and because we didn’t see each other that much – and there were conflicts, you know, stuff like that – I thought never again in our lives would we be able to work together again.

“So when he said yes, I said, ‘Okay, then. He wants to go sailing together, let’s go’,” Binoche recalls with a smile.

But right before filming began, she got cold feet. “I was a little nervous because I didn’t know how it was going to be.”

And because there is so much romantic tension and so many repressed feelings between Eugenie and Dodin, Binoche wondered how they were going to build the relationship and make those characters come alive.

But it all worked out in the end.

Binoche enjoyed her many scenes with Magimel, who won Best Actor at Cannes for the French erotic drama The Piano Teacher (2001), and took home Cesars for the dramas Peaceful (2021) and Pacifiction (2022).

“Actually, I was very surprised that being in his presence, it lifted something in us.

“And we were able to say to each other, ‘I love you no matter what happened’ and ‘It’s wonderful to work with you’.

“We didn’t need to say that, but we could feel how we enjoyed working together,” says Binoche.

The positive experience on set drew the two stars and their daughter, French actress Hana Magimel, much closer.

“It felt like a gift – not only to us, but also to our daughter,” says Binoche.

It also echoed the story in The Taste Of Things, which explores the intersection between love and art.

Eugenie and Dodin play distinct roles in the kitchen, “but they mirror each other: he has this concept and vision, and she makes it real”, Binoche says. “And the beauty of the story is that this couple are able to really reunite through an art form.”

• The Taste Of Things opens in Singapore cinemas on March 21.