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.)
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