Juzo Itami (1985)
Nearly a decade before Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) came this very different Asian film with a culinary-carnal dimension. The writer-director Juzo Itami’s comedy, set in contemporary Japan, has also been jokily termed a ‘ramen Western’. Its chief Western qualification is using the trope of a stranger arriving in town to sort out a problem – Itami’s leading man, Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki), even wears a cowboy hat. Tampopo is a ramen Western in a more literal sense than the Italianised Westerns were spaghetti Westerns: the problem that needs sorting is a struggling roadside ramen noodle store, outside Tokyo, run by the widowed title character (Nobuko Miyamoto). Goro, with his sidekick (Ken Watanabe), helps Tampopo (whose name means ‘dandelion’) transform the place into the best restaurant in town. This story shares screen time with that of a younger couple – a white-suited gangster (Koji Yakusho) and his moll (Fukumi Kuroda) – who explore the erotic possibilities of different foods in a series of vignettes. Plenty more characters pop up in further, one-off vignettes on a cuisine theme – in a gourmet French restaurant a lowly worker astounds and upstages his bosses with his gastronomic knowledge, a sensei conducts a spaghetti-eating etiquette class, and so on.
A prologue to Tampopo takes place in a cinema, where the gangster and his girl take their seats in the front row; white-jacketed waiters serve them posh-looking food and drink. As he’s about to sip champagne, the gangster catches the camera’s eye and addresses the audience beyond it: ‘So you’re watching a movie too!’ He goes on to inveigh against people in cinema audiences who make a noise eating crisps; a man in the row behind him does just that and the gangster threatens to strangle him if he doesn’t stop. Much of the NFT1 audience laughed at this. I wondered if I might have found it funnier seeing Tampopo at BFI in the days when the ban on food in theatres was so strictly observed that I was once taken to task for unwrapping a cough sweet. Juzo Itami’s prologue is, in more ways than one, a taste of things to come. Much of the comedy that follows is broad and I found it pretty effortful. (Anyone in need of a truly funny demonstration of the symbiosis of comestible and sexual appetites on screen is better off with Albert Finney and Joyce Redman in Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963).) During the first hour of Tampopo, I fell asleep twice and was mentally yawning the rest of the time. I didn’t get a lot of the cinema references in which this well-known, admired film supposedly abounds. The ones I did get, I didn’t want. (Why does Itami score the action to solemn classical music, like Mahler’s Death in Venice theme?) I walked out halfway through – an abject end to my 2021 at BFI.
28 December 2021
