Spoken French • Cuisine et dépendances

Practice your listening comprehension with this movie scene

This week we’re heading into the kitchen, literally. Cuisine et dépendances (1993), directed by Philippe Muyl, adapts Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri’s hit 1991 play. Jacques and Martine, a middle-class Parisian couple, are hosting old friends they haven’t seen in ten years, including Charlotte, who’s quietly unraveling. Almost everything happens in the kitchen while the dinner itself unfolds off-screen, and that’s where all the old resentments start bubbling up.

Today’s scene is a little masterpiece of polite pettiness: Martine, a wound-up hostess, fills an awkward silence with Charlotte by talking astrology and the rivalry between the two women is already simmering underneath.

How to work through this scene

Watch the whole scene once first to get a feel for the tone. Martine talks fast, cuts her sentences short, keeps relaunching. Then watch it again, this time trying to catch what they actually say: the liaisons, the hesitations, all of it. Compare with the dialogue in the analysis below. Finally, practice shadowing: say each line out loud, trying to match Martine’s rhythm. It’s a non-stop festival of spoken punctuation (tu sais, enfin, quand même).

Where to watch the film? Cuisine et dépendances is available to rent on the main French VOD platforms (Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Canal VOD). If you’re in France or using a VPN, it’s also the kind of cult comedy you can often find secondhand on DVD or occasionally on French TV replay services.

Found it somewhere else? Let us know in the comments — legal links only, to help other readers track it down.

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Analysis

Alors, évidemment, pour tuer le temps, on a grignoté. So obviously, to kill time, we snacked.

Tuer le temps is the exact equivalent of “to kill time.” Notice the word order: pour tuer le temps is pushed to the front, and on a grignoté lands at the end — spoken French loves saving the main verb for last when the reason comes first.

J’avais acheté un énorme sac de pistaches I’d bought a huge bag of pistachios

Plus-que-parfait (j’avais acheté): the buying happened before the snacking she just mentioned — a small but very natural use of this tense to set the scene before moving the story forward.

J’suis folle des pistaches, moi. J’pourrais en manger des kilos. I’m crazy about pistachios, me. I could eat kilos of them.

Je suis collapses to j’suis in fast speech — even more clipped than the already-common j’sais pas. The pronoun en replaces des pistaches (”kilos of them“) — never skip it. And moi tacked on at the end adds emphasis, doubling down on a subject already stated.

Pardon ! Sorry!

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Et Jacques, il me fait une guerre terrible : « Arrêtez, vous allez vous couper l’appétit »

And Jacques goes to war with me: “Stop, you’re going to ruin your appetite”