Tampopo (2016)

Admirable film.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

It's like if David Lynch/Stanley Kubrick were to direct a movie about food/ramen... you'd get something like "Tampopo". First off, the film stars a really young Ken Watanabe (Last Samurai/Inception/Letters from Iwo Jima) - it's hilarious how young he looks/acts in this. This film isn't just about ramen. It also includes several odd, yet intriguing, short story scenes involving other characters love for other food... when I say love, yeah, I mean literally too - there is a pornographic scene where they show this guy just having sexual encounters with a girl involving food basically every time... playing mouth to mouth with a raw egg trying not to dissolve it... (When I was a really young kid, I saw my parents watching this scene and the part with the shrimp on the stomach forever stayed in my brain. lol) So yeah, this is not really a kids or family film. HahaThere's also a bit where some weird crazy old lady just poking and touching the food at a grocery store. LOL It seems random when you're watching it like what the hell does this got to do with ramen or the film itself? But you realize all those short story scenes involve food/love... it's actually funny because as weird as it may seem, you know all those things could happen. For an 80's film, it's pretty upbeat and fast. It's very quirky. It will make you want to eat some ramen. This really is the only legendary film about ramen. It's a cult classic. If can't handle weird films, this is not for you.

Truck driver Gorô and his young sidekick Gun (Ken Watanabe) stop at a rather sad looking noodle shop. They rescue a boy outside from bullies who turns out to be the son of the widowed shop owner Tampopo. Her noodles are not good and she begs Gorô to be her teacher. In desperation, she even tries to buy and steal a soup recipe. They find homeless people who are cooks. With other experts' help, they refine the noodle shop to greater heights. Meanwhile, there is a gangster in a white suit and his girlfriend testing the boundaries of food erotica. Others vignettes also show people with food.This is a strange and wonderful celebration of food. The characters are lovely. Gorô is a cowboy of sorts and even has the hat. It treats the noodle with reverence. Not all of the minor vignettes work but they add to the quirkiness. The old lady who squeezes is odd as hell although I wouldn't call it funny. It's an unusual movie wrapped around a sweet noodle story.

This is quite literally food pornography in many scenes. You can accurately judge the whole film by the credits scene, which is a 2 minute close up of a woman's nipple as she feeds her baby.The film documents the rather Japanese obsession with food and the "correct" way to eat, prepare, or order it. You can tie it into sexual repression and the replacement of enjoying food instead of enjoying sex. (There is no kissing or sex between any of the characters in the two main love stories, unless food is in their mouths.)The main story of a woman seeking to become the best noodle chef is supplemented by several short scenes of random strangers that are loosely based on the food theme as well, but otherwise have nothing to do with the main narrative. A lot of people would probably like this film a lot more if those unrelated scenes were cut out, leaving the main narrative at about 1 1/2 hours. As is, they are often very seriously filmed while meant to be darkly, bizarrely comical. I don't think many people will find them funny, and some scenes actually reinforce a lot of negative ideals in Japan. For example, a couples' food fetishism beginning when a gangster buys an oyster from a child diver (she might be 12 or so) and eats it from her hand, whereby they start making out. A husband attempts to keep his wife alive a few minutes longer by demanding she make the family dinner before dying. An old lady with dementia damages all the food in a grocery store while "inspecting" it, and the store owner chases her around the store.These highlight very real issues in Japan. Ignored mental illness in the elderly. Rigid gender roles and unhappy marriages. The worship and fetishization of young girls by men old enough to be their fathers. Far from being a document of these issues, the film does not seem to censure them in anyway, and actually to support them a bit. Take them out and you're still left with a main story that has hollow comedy, is mired in boring details, and has an irresolute love story. And it's all built around the idea that a woman needs a team of men to teach her how to be a good noodle cook, despite one's comment that "I never believed a woman could be as good of a noodle chef as a man!"Frankly, it's a movie that is cleverly directed, but whose story and tone were archaic at the time, and are even more disgusting by modern standards. Look elsewhere for depth or entertainment.

I love this film and often recommend it to students of scriptwriting as a model of anti-script «a la Syd Field». Free structure, all kinds of vignettes about food, the art of cooking (Itami, I believe, was a chef), closed with a loving image that tells all about us humans' urge to eat. Best images are those beautiful erotic shots that illustrate the story of a handsome cinéphile gangster dressed in white (the scenes featuring an egg and a shrimp, are topped by the one with an oyster and a very young female fisher), but you will surely enjoy several comedy vignettes, that freely disrupt the central story, including the bureaucrats' lunch, the etiquette lady who is teaching young women how to eat spaghetti, the old master teaching his young pupil how to approach a bowl of ramen soup, the character with a tooth ache, the dying woman who prepares meal for her family… But of course, the main story (taken from «Shane», of the stranger that helps a family) is very good, about how Tampopo, the owner of a cheap road café, is taught how to make good soup by a truck driver and several other characters, with industrial spying included. An excellent post-modern comedy, that will probably make you want to run to the next Japanese restaurant and have a bowl of hot ramen soup.