Peter Strickland (2022)

The Sonic Catering Institute is a formidably niche centre for the performing arts.  Headed by Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), who favours red lipstick, kohl eye make-up and power-dressing with frills, the Institute plays host to exponents of culinary-cum-acoustic theatre.  The latest to take up a residency there are a ‘collective’ comprising Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed), Lamina Propria (Ariane Lebed) and Billy Rubin (Asa Butterfield).  Volatile control freak Elle di Elle (‘a pun on “low-density lipoprotein”, or “bad cholesterol”’, says Jonathan Romney) is decidedly the boss of the outfit.  She’s less decided, to Jan’s mounting exasperation, on the trio’s stage name.  Elle’s artistic mission in life was inspired by a traumatic happening in kindergarten, where her teacher suffered a fatal allergic reaction to a ‘chocolate wonder cake’.  The infant Elle experienced an epiphany – that food ‘so tasty for me could be so deadly for her’ – or so she tells Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), the Institute’s ‘dossierge’, whose job it is to interview visiting creatives and document their residency.  In their first workshop – watched by Jan, Stones and an invited audience of Institute members – Lamina and Billy throw food into pans on burners and twiddle sound knobs while Elle, naked and blood-smeared, plays the role of a pig being slaughtered (offstage, she’s vegetarian).  She worries that sonic hitches have ruined the performance but Jan reassures Elle that it was very well received.  This is confirmed in an after-show sub-orgy, with appreciative spectators fondling the artistes – the Institute’s usual, distinctive take on audience participation.  Even so, Jan’s concerned by the sound problems and wants a say in the staging of the collective’s future shows.  ‘You can keep the epicurean toxicity,’ she tells Elle, ‘but indulge me on the flanger, please’.  This is the start of the pair’s battle of wills.  Elle doesn’t know what a flanger is but it’s against her principles to accede to anyone else’s wishes.

Before seeing Flux Gourmet, I’d never heard of a ‘flanger’ either – an electronic device used to create ‘an audio effect that results when the same signal is played from two sources with a minute but variable time delay between them’ (Collins online dictionary).  As an obscure word that crops up repeatedly in Peter Strickland’s script, ‘flanger’ acquires the quality of a double entendre – one of two reasons why it’s amusing each time you hear it.  The other reason is the reading of lines containing the word:  the delivery of these, usually by Gwendoline Christie, is straight-faced and straight-voiced – as it should be, since ‘flanger’ is always used according to its proper technical meaning.  As usual in a Strickland enterprise, the actors’ treating the material seriously is crucial.  It heightens the preposterousness of the story Strickland is telling yet makes the characters in it matter as people.  No surprise that Wikipedia calls Flux Gourmet, which is often macabre and occasionally revolting, a ‘black comedy’.  That overused term is often merely a euphemism for lack of comic clarity; in this case, the label simply doesn’t do justice to the complexity of Strickland’s creation.  He’s an expert purveyor of the painfully funny, an ingenious explorer on the boundary between funny ha-ha and funny peculiar.

Strickland’s body of work is now large enough for Flux Gourmet, his fifth feature, to evoke facets of his earlier films.  The Sonic Catering Institute, which stands in its own grounds, is, like the principals’ habitat in The Duke of Burgundy (2014), a world apart.  The audiovisual properties of food were given a tryout in Berberian Sound Studio (2012).  (The concept of the Institute in this new film also has an autobiographical basis:  a Variety interview with Strickland at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, where Flux Gourmet premiered, notes that, in 1996, he co-founded ‘the Sonic Catering Band project …, which took the raw sounds recorded from the cooking and preparing of a vegetarian meal and treated them via processing, cutting, mixing and layering.  No source sounds other than those coming from the cooking of the dish were used and every dish was consumed by all members of the band’.)  Improvisation scenarios that Jan Stevens devises for Elle, Lamina and Billy have a supermarket setting that picks up the ‘retail malady’ theme of In Fabric (2018).  Each of these echoes is hard to miss.  None of them detracts from Flux Gourmet’s originality.

There’s a voiceover narration (in Greek, though the rest of the dialogue is in English), supplied by Stones.  This squat, unprepossessing, middle-aged man – a self-described ‘hack writer’, despised by others at the Institute and at first peripheral to the power struggles going on under its roof – becomes increasingly hard to ignore.  He suffers from chronic flatulence – small consolation that (Stones’s voiceover tells us) the results sound worse than they smell.  Having to share a small dormitory with members of the residency is acutely embarrassing for him; besides, Stones has gastric reflux, and his breath does stink.  He seeks help from Dr Glock (Richard Bremmer), the Institute’s fiercely insensitive in-house medic, who carries out tests.  ‘Am I going to die?’ asks the miserably fearful patient.  ‘Name me a living thing that isn’t,’ the bedside-mannerless doctor replies.  In contrast to Glock, and to her own usual impatience with everyone but herself, Elle seems almost sympathetic to Stones’s doomed attempts to visit the dorm toilet discreetly during the night.  Her curiosity turns out to be creative opportunism.  Elle sees Stones’s potential to contribute to her art.

This leads to Stones undergoing a public colonoscopy.  In front of the usual Institute audience, he lies on stage with Glock’s fibre-optic probe up his backside; what the high-definition camera discovers in his gut is projected on a screen that he can’t see but plenty of others can.  The exhibition seems to complete Stones’s humiliation but his fortunes then take a turn for the better.  He’s diagnosed as coeliac rather than dangerously ill.  By the time the collective’s concluding show takes place, he’s involved in the performance in (what he finds) a more rewarding way:  his voiceover explains that he’s glad at last to ‘feel part of something’.  Strickland has said that he hopes he ‘treats stomach problems responsibly while still pushing the boundaries of taste’.  Viewers with gastro-intestinal complaints of their own may reasonably struggle to think he gets the balance right but it’s fair to say Strickland hardly makes light of Stones’s health problems and resulting indignity.  The Flux Gourmet cast includes people with whom the writer-director has worked before and newcomers to his company.  Fatma Mohamed, uniquely, has appeared in every one of his features.  Gwendoline Christie, Richard Bremmer and Leo Bill (as Wim, the Institute’s technical assistant) are back for more after In Fabric.  Like Asa Butterfield and Ariane Lebed, Makis Papadimitriou is making his Strickland debut and he does outstanding work.  This actor has made plenty of movies in his native Greece but I’m guessing it was the best-known of them, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Chevalier (2015), through which Strickland noticed and remembered him.  As Stones, Papadimitriou is memorably melancholic.  You root for this sad-eyed underdog, who can’t even suffer in silence.  You enjoy his eventual sort-of triumph.

In their different ways Jan and Elle are both prima donnas and, as events unfold, increasingly vulnerable.  Jan is disturbed by a series of phone calls:  we don’t hear what the caller says but it’s clear from the reaction that it’s threatening.  Elle’s autocratic leadership causes creative rifts with Lamina and Billy to widen – the other two both decide to go solo once the residency’s over.  The Institute and the collective alike are plagued by an outfit called The Mangrove Snacks, resentful that Jan turned them down for a residency – ‘I don’t like what they do to terrapins’ – and determined to wreak vengeful havoc.  Elle and co arrive for a rehearsal to find the room vandalised:  there’s a terrapin in a food blender and the slogan ‘The Patrons Are All Criminals’ daubed on furniture.  Jan assures all concerned that she’s contacted the police, who’ll take fingerprints and find the culprits.  Appearances can be deceptive with both leading ladies.  Jan’s clenched integrity and hauteur in conducting Institute business are somewhat undercut by her private life.  She seduces Billy, who rejects the idea of a long-term relationship and sends her into hysterics.  Elle, suspicious when nothing is removed from the rehearsal-room crime scene except the flanger that Jan has wanted to get her hands on ever since the opening show, investigates further.  With Billy and Lamina, she breaks into Jan’s bedroom where they find the flanger in a birdcage and Jan sleeping with the policeman who was meant to be pursuing The Mangrove Snacks.  After Stones delivers a stool sample to Dr Glock, Elle appears to appropriate it for a ‘scatological performance’ on stage.  She smears her face and body with what the audience is meant to think is excrement.  When technical assistant Wim decides to taste it, he discovers it’s chocolate mousse.

Strickland punctuates the narrative with dinner-table sequences in which each of Elle, Billy and Lamina, in that order, makes a speech to Institute personnel.  Each speech is interrupted by Dr Glock – his snide, showoff heckling peppered with allusions to classical Greece – until the rarely combative Lamina finally shuts him up (‘I don’t need your meta-textual, pseudo-Hellenic, alpha-intellectual one-upmanship’).  As Lamina and Billy confirm they’re leaving Elle, two figures with rifles burst into the dining room; accusing her of orchestrating events to bring about the end of the collective, Elle tries to attack Jan and is shot by one of the intruders.  She falls to the ground and, after whispering her latest suggestion for her band’s stage name, expires.  The funerary sequence that follows features both a coffin that we assume contains Elle and ritual destruction of the gluten products that had made Stones’s life a misery.  Elle’s death is what gives him the opportunity to join Lamina and Billy in their last piece:  it’s also the culminating deception, on the part of Elle – and perhaps of Peter Strickland, too.  Human body parts – Elle’s, surely – are put into a blender and Stones partakes of the resulting smoothie on stage.  But when the audience breaks into enthusiastic applause, Elle is clapping along with the best of them.  Has she, rather than Jan Stevens, been the prime mover throughout?  Or is auteur Strickland finally acknowledging how much he has been playing the audience?  The closing credits are accompanied by Gene Pitney’s ‘Backstage’, an impassioned account of the chasm between performance and reality.

The cinematographer Tim Sidell shoots the film, especially the comestibles, in a suitably extraordinary range of tones:  palette animating palate.  It goes almost without saying, given the subject and Strickland’s track record, that the sound design is ingenious.  The combination of food as bizarre theatre and digestive problems might suggest a two-pronged lampoon of artistic pretension and consumerism:  that may be one way of describing Flux Gourmet but it doesn’t feel like the whole story, either as you watch or in retrospect (just as In Fabric did much more than poke fun at the extremities of shopping culture).  This is thanks in part to Strickland’s surrealist flair:  even allowing that satire tends to trade in exaggeration, his images are often too startling to register as satirical.  It’s also thanks to his gift for convincing us that the absurd confrontations between his characters are genuinely important to the people involved.  Strickland himself may have skin in the game through his Sonic Catering Band but few viewers of Flux Gourmet will be able to apply any kind of aesthetic standard to the theatrical effort on display.  We can’t say if Elle et al are good or bad at what they profess to do because it’s so recherché – to put it mildly:  sonic catering is, for most of us, an artistic practice peculiar to the world of the film.  We can see, though, how much it matters to those concerned.  It’s hard to describe what Peter Strickland achieves here without making his work sound unappealingly weighty, which badly misrepresents Flux Gourmet.  The film is sometimes baffling, often funny, never mocking, always singularly entertaining.

21 December 2022