CONTEMPT FOR GREEN BEANS

There is a meal that I despised for years without imagining that one day it would end up becoming a taste of home: green beans with boiled potatoes, hard-boiled egg, olive oil, salt and pepper.

For a long time I looked down on them. They seemed like sick people's food, hospital food, the kind of dishes that appear when there's not much else to do.

In Chile, it's not a very common dish. Green beans are usually eaten as a salad, with lemon or mayonnaise, or as part of one of the best Chilean culinary inventions: the chacarero, that wonderful sandwich with meat, green beans, and chili pepper.

But when I arrived in Spain, I discovered another connection to this dish. And the funny thing is, now I love it. Over the years, the flavors we call "home" cease to belong solely to the place where we were born. In my kitchen and in my heart, Chilean cuisine is beginning to coexist with Catalan dishes, and probably, in a few years, rösti will also become part of that memory.

The Recipe Behind My Contempt for Green Beans

Ingredients (2 people)

• 250g of green beans.

• 250g of potatoes.

• 4 eggs.

• Extra virgin olive oil.

• Salt.

• Black pepper.

Preparation

Wash the green beans and trim the ends. Cook them for 15-20 minutes; I like them still a little crunchy, so I prefer to keep tasting them.

Boil the potatoes in their skins until tender. Then cool them with cold water and peel them with your hands.

Boil the eggs until they are hard-boiled.

When everything is ready, roughly chop the potatoes and beans, without worrying too much about the presentation. Halve the eggs and finish the dish with a generous drizzle of olive oil, salt, and pepper.

It doesn't need anything else.

But I'm talking about home when I really wanted to talk to you about a movie about contempt.

Contempt ( Le Mépris , 1963), by Jean-Luc Godard, is based on the novel of the same name by Alberto Moravia. It tells the story of Paul Javal, a French screenwriter commissioned to adapt The Odyssey for an American producer, Jerry Prokosch, who wants to turn it into a commercial film directed by Fritz Lang, who appears playing himself. Paul travels to Capri with his wife, Camille, to work on the project.

During filming, a rift begins to appear in the couple's relationship. Camille senses that Paul is using her, abandoning her emotionally, and that, at a crucial moment, he symbolically surrenders her to the producer's desires to further his career. From this point on, Camille's contempt for Paul is born: not as mere anger, but as the feeling that something essential to their relationship has been shattered.

The film appears to tell a story about a couple, but it actually deals with many things: love, pride, money, art commodified, and the impossibility of fully understanding another person. It is also a fierce reflection on the film industry and what happens when artistic creation becomes trapped between economic interests and egos.

As with almost all of Godard's films, the essential happens in the spaces between things. The story is built on silences, glances, and small gestures much more than on action.

Camille, who loved Paul, ends up despising him. I, who for years despised green beans, ended up finding in them a taste of home.

Two seemingly opposing movements, but born from the same place: a change in the way of looking.

What really changes? The object we look at or the person who observes?

In my case, green beans ceased to be a sad dish and became a symbol of memory, affection, and a new way of feeling at home. Camille, on the other hand, stopped finding a home in Paul.

Contempt reminds us that love, like rejection, also depends on the way we look at things.

Perhaps Camille could have used a plate of green beans to get through that difficult time.