Tampopo part 12

Film: Tampopo
Directed by Juzo Itami
Japan (1986)
Comedy/Satire
12 parts/110 mins

In Japanese with English Subtitles (default)
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(WARNING: Film contains a brief scene of nudity and sexuality. Rated R by MPAA)

Synopsis:

Tampopo is an owner of a rundown noodle shop that barely brings in any customers. One day a truck driver named Goro enters her restaurant and offers to help Tampopo turn her misfortune around and train her to become a master noodle chef. Along with this main narrative are interspersed a handful of intersecting vignettes all surrounding food used a means to comment and satirize on Japan's culture and rigid social mores and hierarchy.


Review:

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 stranger (who aids a young widow named Tampopo as she struggles to make the best bowl of ramen noodles in town. Juzo Itami, the director of the Japanese film "Tampopo," may be the most impenitent hedonist the movies have ever seen. As a filmmaker, he revels in sensual pleasure, and the spirit of his film is exultant, orgiastic. The movie has been described elsewhere as "Zen and the Art of Noodle-making" but its spirit couldn't be less Zen-like. Itami isn't interested in detachment. He's a zesty, immoderate connoisseur of pleasure-taking in all its forms -- food, sex, movies -- and he jumbles them all together here into a hilarious concoction. It's half movie, half dessert-topping -- a film gourmand's lusty dream. 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.




Itami has crammed his movie full of allusions and mini-homages to westerns. When Tampopo dreams that a visiting gang of ramen chefs from another restaurant comes to challenge her noodle-making skill, they stride down the street like gunmen out of "The Magnificent Seven." And when the time comes for Tampopo's final noodle exam, Itami films it like a shootout. (It's Gunfight at the OK Bar and Grill.) There are also comical western aspects in Goro, who functions as a sort of combination of Shane -- the mythical hero, who comes to town, sets everything right, and then moves on -- and the tight-lipped, Man-With-No-Name character Clint Eastwood played in the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns.

In other films about food, such as "Like Water for Chocolate" or Eat Drink Man Woman," the subject is treated seriously as a drama, whereas Tampopo displays a healthy dosage of humor in linking food and sex or food and romance through the unique sensibility of its maker. The film's various goofy elements offer some perceptive observations about the joy and fear of eating--above all passion for food without neglecting other distinctly Japanese phenomena and cultural myths, such as tea-drinking, flower-arrangement, and even suicide. What fuels the movie's comedy is its characters' exaggerated lack of perspective about their enthusiasms. The movie's ground is the ludicrousness of its characters' passions. It's a parody of the epicure's fetishistic rapture in obscure delights. Itami forces his characters to extraordinary lengths to feed their appetites. In order to attain her goal of becoming a master chef, Tampopo trains like a decathlete, with Goro acting as her coach. And to get just the right recipe for her soup, they're not above bribery or rifling through a successful restaurant's garbage to filch their secrets.

Category:

Film & Animation

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[MoChanTTwTT]

Thank you so much for having this! I needed to do a comparison paper but the library had already rented out the movie to another girl in the class! You have helped this college student's procrastination not be a total disaster!!!

[dennisvillegas]

This movie is all about eating from start to finish LOL. Makes me feel hungry for Ramen!

[Kewfung]

Thank you for this!

[justinlloyd3]

boob at 6:58

[kitsuki14]

@ishmyl99 agreed, very much appreciated his role in high and low

[ijaxinwz]

Greatest last shot ever?

[karakuridoller]

いやあ、おいしかった。

大三元みたいな店今もありそうだね。

最後まで飲み干せる後味のキレが伊丹作品の良さだなあ。

[kawayan88]

i thought the baby will remove his mouth from the breast, then there'll be another "and this" (flagged by youtube) XD

[Harusama]

@xINVISIGOTHx I was also rather sad when Tampopo became successful.. but it was a bitter sweet sadness and I know Goro will return to the shop in the future.

Also, the woman at the end seemed to be more of a final tribute to the theme of food. [All of the mini stories shown throughout the film along side Tampopos were also, if you hadn't noticed, about food.] After all, milk from a mothers breast is the first form of substance we receive in life.

[shibaath]

おふくろの味ｗｗｗ

[xINVISIGOTHx]

I feel sad that the second she became successful, all her new friends left her to be alone. (is that supposed to be tampopo in the closing credits?)

[ishmyl99]

Tsutomu Yamazaki, who plays Goro-san here, is a magnificent actor. Highly versatile. Comedy. Drama. Tragedy. Pathos. You name it. He goes the distance. Just two examples of stellar performances by him, and in two truly exceptional films:

"High and Low" (Kurosawa, 1963)

"Go" (Yukisada, 2001) -- but, sadly, very hard to find in English subtitles

Yamazaki, one of Japan's greatest screen actors, but little known outside Japan.