FLUX GOURMET (February 2022)

   

FLUX GOURMET

(February 2022)

“Cooking and performing is always a hazard.”

Peter Strickland is in the shops, going through the aisles and tossing performers he’s worked with in the past into his shopping trolley--Gwendoline Christie and Richard Bremmer and Leo Bill from In Fabric, Fatma Mohamed from all of his feature films and the “Cobbler’s Lot” segment from The Field Guide to Evil--then adding Ariane Labed, Asa Butterfield, and Makis Papadimitriou to the lot.

He then breezes through the checkout and rushes home so he can whip up yet another luscious Technicolor dish for us with Flux Gourmet, perhaps the oddest effort of his that I’ve seen yet.

Christie plays Jan Stevens, Director of the Sonic Catering Institute, which sponsors “culinary collectives” (otherwise known as Sonic Caterers) on a monthly residency basis, to actively “…encourage the artistic pursuit of alimentary and culinary salvation.”

Described by one of the film’s characters as “feckless faux provocateurs”, Sonic Caterers are basically performance artists working to find the “sonic and performative potential” of foodstuffs.

Or something like that…

Like I said, it’s the oddest film I’ve seen from Strickland yet…

“To taste their shock is to be controlled by it.”

Flux Gourmet follows the residency of the collective led by Elle di Elle (Mohamed), and the tension engendered from the conflicts between Elle and, well, everybody. (Weeks into their residency and Elle still hasn’t decided on the band’s name.)

Not to mention the “escalating threat” from The Mangrove Snacks, another collective that was denied residency…

There’s also a (possibly life-threatening) gastrointestinal illness and some scatological hijinx somewhere in there as well…

“I do wonder sometimes if you’re perpetuating an archetype of epicurean toxicity with all this culinary hysteria. I don’t want to give the public the impression we’re espousing any kind of dysfunctional alimentary ideology.”

Absurdly humorous with some oddly touching moments sprinkled throughout, Flux Gourmet doesn’t really have the horror-tinged streaks found in Berberian Sound Studio and In Fabric, but it is, nonetheless, clearly a Strickland piece, with his aesthetic fixations and preoccupations plain to see.

So if all that sounds like something that might agree with your cinematic palette (and stomach), then by all means, dig in…

“When I see joy and abandon, my mind always reverts to this: why can one stomach be so free and another can’t?”

(Flux Gourmet OS courtesy of impawards.com.)