Director Jûzô Itami
Writer Jûzô Itami (screenplay)
With Ken Watanabe, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto
Tampopo or Tampopo is not only “ramen western” or “noodle western” in the tradition of the spaghetti westerns but so much more. There is a constant of eating and food plays a preeminent role in Japanese movies and manga. There is even food or cooking mangas, and so food becomes an almost default aspect where everything meets, wheressurfaces touch and coalesce, where sociabilty gets tested out and remade, where stranger and friends meet, juices mix and gourmet erotica gets played out, where the entire material universe gets made and unmade, where everything combines, joins at the same table, differences aside, and slurping at full power levels is required.
During the COVID SARS 2 pandemic all Instagram and social media got rapidly inundated by endless streams of home cooking, umami quests or generalized hipster craft. Disappearing spaghetti’s and instant yeast scaricity was the first sign that people in the order-online, prosperous West where finally cooking on a daily basis. Africa, Brasil and India, where a majority still cooks but where reserves and storage is problem started to suffer from shortages and choosing btw food rations and getting infected became an issue. On the Romanian social media “Breadism” was cynically called the only true COVID art moment fermenting out of the quarantine, since everybody started proudly posting his own selfmade bread photos. This is the moment where hate started accruing against a world wide phenomenon that has been gaining attention and force as climate action and Extinction Rebellion and Meat Industry seemed to fuse into one. Whatever you might think about ethical cooking or food artist residencies, branding the foodies in your group of friends or whatever u might think of food tourism and grand chef series(still a male reserve – but that starts to change), COVID has seen restaurants dead and dying at a time when restaurant level or food critic level photos with home made ramen bowls and lavish dinners just got nominated as the most apolitical and insensitive trend of the last decades. In those lucky countries or city that have returned to the new normal – terraces & restaurants have been invaded, ppl defintely cannot abide cooking at home anymore and uses any occasion to get eat out.
Because of that I am moving into another register, I am willing to risk drawing more ire with Tampopo – a film that everybody needs to see. Without a doubt, it is one of the most endearing, horny and delightful movies of all times. It not only eats sex in a bowl and features live shrimp tickling action, but also reflects on the medium of cinema as serving and feeding an insatiable lust.
It arrives to us from a time of Japanese tech preeminence and bubble economy, where everything seems to grow and grow and grow and Lazer disks are the future. From the time when American car workers union members smash Japanese car imports publicly as a protest comes a comedy on par with the best comedies in the world. It is as silly, zany and no worries as we imagine that decade before the Asian Crisis must have felt. It is super colorful and also veers towards the surprisingly ‘pure skills’ non-automated, non- technological soba or ramen privately owned businesses catering to busy white collar workers. It sports a TV cook show aesthetic that increasingly exhibits a nostalgic streak for the analog smells, of secret recipes more valuable than stolen patent or industrial espionage scandals, full of sensual bodily pleasures in the midst of increasing digitization and arcade disembodiment. Good to figuring out the perfect umami of such a movie. In spite of Japanese specificity, it is an universal movie, it translates trough and trough and is also about translations, from one kitchen into another, from one pot into another, about honing body intelligence, about things that you learn only by doing. How to figure out the order of servings, what is the good distance or how to train for lifting heavy pots, the mind boggling proper moment of patiently tasting each element swimming in your soup. It also figures an erogaro gangster yakuza neo-noir hero cutting his lip while sucking the contents of an oyster handed to him by a underwater maiden in an incredible gesture that reminds Suehiro Maruo’s works.
What makes it so irresistible? Well, apart from its constant humorous bursts, it has at its center an incredible heroine called dandelion – Tampopo that gives the name to the ramen joint and to the movie. A heroine that is a single mom, not at all the clichee success woman of the 80s, even if she is the total fast food entrepreneur. Tampopo cooks the mind as the body as the soup becomes a Japanese bath.
Of course there are lots of sexist and macho action overtly satirized (Japanese trucker cowboy cook critics beware!) and what even back then might appear as insensitive Chinese stereotyping, but what the movies lacks it overcomes as a metaphysical level study of Ramen and trough it of how to think and enjoy food that has no bounds. Ramen noodles soup is the total Asian melting pot, and maybe even a clear broth look into the way Japanese culture offers so many repackaged Chinese recipes (Buddhism, Confucianism, architecture etc) In spite of its nationalist darkside, in spite of hardly saying sorry and a very late recognition of massacres by the hand of Japanese occupation troops and its politically toxic attitude towards its Imperial past or its isolationist pretense, in such movies as Tampopo, Japan comes across as a fast uninhibited learner, always able to laud & applaud the magic pot that has fed it and recognize at its very heart how much it cherishes what it learned and kept simmering from mainland China.
It also features the most incredible gourmet hobo gang – sneaking into hotel or restaurant institutions to cook or – the biggest experts on the best wine, choosing the best morsels and the only one commission to award the five stars. It is very hard to pay tribute to such an amazing movie and I sadly I left out a lot of details that one has to taste alone (or in good company).
TimeSpace Warps 