THE FOOD TASTER

Screenwriter Elbling (Honey I Blew Up the Kids)—in disguise here as translator—offers up a clever tale, set in 16th-century Italy, of a peasant-turned-food-taster who survives by his wits, as well as by luck and a few twists of the incredible.

As a boy in rural Tuscany, Ugo watched his mother hang herself rather than die of the plague; later, his wife died in childbirth, leaving him to raise their daughter Miranda. His life might have met an equally brutish end were it not for the fact that Duke Federico, the local lord, on the point of impaling Ugo just for sport, was reminded that he had recently done away his food taster and needed a replacement. Thus elevated to an essential part of the Duke’s retinue, Ugo pulls through intrigues and attempted poisonings of the family of Federico’s wife, all the while protecting his beautiful, budding Miranda from defilers. But when the plague visits and carries off the Duke’s favorite whore, among countless others, Federico decides a change is in order and journeys to Milan in search of a new wife. There, Ugo falls in love with a fellow taster, the only woman to hold the job, but in his cleverness he persuades his peers that he survives by witchcraft, thereby enriching his master while increasing his own exposure to danger. The wife-search having failed, Federico returns home, where Ugo is horrified as his older brother, previously a bloodthirsty bandit, suddenly appears in court to exert a Rasputin-like influence over the Duke. When Federico selects Miranda as his bride-to-be, what lies ahead for Ugo is a disaster that nothing short of divine intervention can prevent.

Perhaps miracles are all we poor mortals have to forestall untimely ends, but in fiction one hopes for something more plausible.