tampopo (1985)
Tampopo is one of the earliest movies I remember reading about on one of Criterion's hand-curated lists; it sounded interesting but I think this was before I had started doing my little monthly movie night, so it filed itself away in the back of my brain and I forgot about it. Then I encountered it while I was looking for . . . I dunno, something about whether the movie Flow was getting released on the Criterion Channel sometime soon? There was a Reddit thread talking about it, and my brain went "oh yeah!"
It's sort of impossible to describe this film in a way which does it justice. It is described as a "ramen western;" I think if I were being forced to give it A blurb I'd describe it as Seven Samurai, but with noodles. It's about food, and the many ways humans relate with it; it is deeply weird and delightful.
The story follows the titular Tampopo as she recruits a band of randos to help her make her ramen shop into the best ramen shop in the city, and features a patchwork of scenes that are often entirely unrelated, of people eating: a woman on her death bed gets up to cook one last meal for her family, then dies; a group of young women taking a class on the etiquette of eating spaghetti (it must be done absolutely silently, the teacher insists) are overcome with the desire to slurp their noodles loudly, in what I am given to understand is Japanese tradition; a junior member of a group of salarymen and business executives shows off his extensive knowledge of French cuisine at a restaurant. And then there's this yakuza-coded fellow and his girlfriend who do various sexy things with food, and you kind of get the feeling that they're both more into the food part than the sex part. He also yells at the audience during the intro that he will kill them if they eat loudly during the movie, and honestly? We need more movies that do this.
I was so charmed by this movie; it's unique and weird and surreal and just a ton of fun from the word go. This one will be fun to share with people in the future, I think. It will make you want a bowl of ramen, though.