The Secret Is in the Sauce

Saturday, November 14, 4:15 PM at the usual place

FIRST FEATURE:
"Tampopo" (Japanese, 1985, 114 min) Directed and written by Juzo Itami; starring Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Ken Watanabe, Kôji Yakusho, Rikiya Yasuoka.

The "All Movie Guide" review by Jonathan Crow
    A gleeful thumb in the eye of Japan's money-mad 1980s culture, Juzo Itami's masterpiece subverts all that is right and proper with food and sex. Dubbed the first "noodle western," the film concerns a craggy-faced Shane-like stranger (he drives a semi instead of a horse) who aids a young widow named Tampopo as she struggles to make the best bowl of ramen noodles in town. On one level, the film works as an odd metaphor for Japan's newfound affluence, built on avid borrowings from other cultures. Each of the figures who gathers around to help Tampopo has a distinct national signifier: the belligerent, often drunk Piskin (not a common Japanese name) evokes Russia, the itinerant Noodle Master who sports a beret and speaks wistfully about French cuisine indicates France, and, of course, the cowboy hat-sporting Goro recalls the United States. Yet the film's loose structure, organized around seemingly unrelated vignettes, gives it a wider cultural resonance. From the scene in which the Man in the White Suit and his moll perform an unnatural act with raw egg to the corporate neophyte who upstages his boss with his expert knowledge of gourmet cuisine to the old woman who molests fruit in a grocery store, everyone in Tampopo is obsessed with food and uses it to stage their own quiet, often perverse protests against Japan's rigid hierarchical society. Like films from the French New Wave, "Tampopo" is a dizzying, kaleidoscopic inside joke. Itami includes references from the aforementioned "Shane" (1953) to "Breathless" (1960) to the later works of Luis Buñuel and Luchino Visconti's "Death in Venice" (1971) (complete with a soundtrack drawn from Gustav Mahler's First and Third Symphonies). Tampopo is a wildly inventive, fantastically entertaining movie by a film master at the peak of his powers.


DINNER BREAK
Thanksgiving Dinner. If you plan to attend, please e-mail David with what you plan to bring. A $2 donation is requested for the turkey.

A tasty comedy of bad manners.

SECOND FEATURE:
"Eating Raoul" (1982, 90 min) Directed by Paul Bartel; written by Paul Bartel & Richard Blackburn; starring Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, Robert Beltran, Susan Saiger, Lynn Hobart, Richard Paul, Mark Woods, John Shearin, Darcy Pulliam, Ben Haller.

The "All Movie Guide" review by Michael Costello:
     Paul Bartel's black comedy about a middle-class couple who want to open a restaurant has become a cult classic. Bartel and Mary Woronov play a staid couple who formulate a plan to murder and rob "swingers" to finance their dream of opening a gourmet restaurant. Bartel, who dealt in black comedy long before it became fashionable, has created an oddly affectionate satire of this Moral Majority couple, whose righteousness is concealed behind anonymous polyester surfaces, and are literally dubbed the Blands. Although they believe that the "swingers", i.e. anyone single who is having sex, deserve to die for their terrible transgressions, they're so humane toward their victims that they evoke especially unctuous undertakers. Mary Woronov, a fixture of Warhol's Factory in the '60s, and someone whose mien always suggested the unspeakable, is a witty choice as the homicidal wife, and Bartel adopts the role of tract-house suburbanite with eerie aplomb.


SHORT SUBJECTS:
TBA

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