Every six months or so, I hunger to watch films about food. My first port of call is usually the selections at the culinary cinema strands of the San Sebastian and Berlin film festivals. Sadly, most of the time, these mouth-watering films are not accessible easily.
My next recourse is to fall back upon memory and revisit the many fine examples of culinary cinema, several of which are bona fide masterpieces, including Jûzô Itami’s
Tampopo (1985), Ang Lee’s
Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Gabriel Axel’s
Babette’s Feast (1987), Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci’s
Big Night (1996) and Marco Ferreri’s
The Big Feast (1973), to name just a few. Of course, these films are about much more than just food, exploring various facets of the human condition as they do.
This craving struck me again recently, and as I was dusting off the DVDs of aforementioned classics, I decided to take a radical step. The bold decision that I arrived at was to watch food-related films that had previously escaped my all-consuming appetite. Now, I am a big fan of Hong Kong’s writer, actor, producer, director and composer Stephen Chow, mainly because of his comic timing and balletic action choreography in films like Shaolin Soccer (2001) and Kung Fu Hustle (2004). I had not seen one of his early hits, The God of Cookery (1996), where he plays a pompous chef with the eponymous title, who loses it and must reclaim it, and proceeded to acquire it. It was a mistake. Filled with the cheesy synthesiser music endemic to Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, the film turned out to be loud and shrill, with only flashes of the later Chow present.
Wounded, I took recourse to cheesiness of the Americana variety. In Robert Allan Ackerman’s
The Ramen Girl (2008), the pouty and ditzy Brittany Murphy arrives in Tokyo in pursuit of her boyfriend who dumps her immediately. Instead of celebrating this, and the fact that he’s left her in a vast, paid-for apartment in the heart of the city, she proceeds to alternately cry buckets and mope. Succour arrives in the shape of a neighbouring ramen restaurant, where she learns life lessons from the gruff chef (Toshiyuki Nishida). I watched this in the hope that there would be extended gratuitous shots of tonkotsu broth making. My food prurience was only partly satisfied. Curious about the team behind this farrago, I looked them up. Nishida, the only saving grace of the movie, continues to enjoy a successful career in Japan. Murphy’s career more or less crashed and burned shortly after this film. Ackerman, a successful theatre director, returned to his core competence and never directed a film again.
Not having learnt my lesson, I turned to contemporary fare. All I can tell you about Wai Man Yip’s Cook Up a Storm (2017) is that it doesn’t. Being a glutton for punishment, I hopped over to Chapman To’s Let’s Eat (2016). I can tell you I’m cured now, at least until the Criterion Blu-ray of Tampopo releases next week.
