We call any old instant noodles ramen here
in the West, but in Japan, there are very definite rules as to what constitutes
ramen and how it should be prepared. It is a deceptively simple but nourishing
dish, like many great Japanese films. When it released in 1985, it launched the
culinary movie trend best represented by the likes of Babette’s Feast, Le Grand Chef, and Eat Drink Man Woman. It also predates the other great “noodle neo-western,”
A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop. You
will learn to respect and crave ramen in Juzo Itami’s newly 4K-restored Tampopo (trailer here), which opens this
Friday at Film Forum.
While his partner Gorō drives, Gun reads a
book of ramen reminisces that makes both of them hungry. Fatefully, they stop
at Tampopo’s ramen restaurant. Frankly, her ramen is not very good, but Gorō
rather enjoys her company. In fact, when a thuggish contractor creates a scene,
Gorō two-fistedly settles it outside, despite being out-numbered. Thus, an
ambiguously romantic friendship is born between Tampopo and her champion. As an
unlikely ramen expert, he also starts coaching her in ways to improve her
noodles and broth. Soon, he recruits a rag-tag team of specialists to lend
their particular expertise and eccentricity.
In between Tampopo’s worst-to-first
campaign, Itami intersperses loopy food-related interludes, including a scene
involving a grocer stalking a serial produce-squeezer that plays like a send-up
of the supermarket scene in Stallone’s Cobra,
except Tampopo predates that film as
well. Periodically, Itami returns to an unnamed Yakuza in hiding with his lover,
whom he sexually relates to through food.
Like so many of the foodie movies that
followed it, Tampopo definitely uses
food as a metaphor for life and love. However, few films are as willing to be
as randomly goofy as Itami’s ramen opera. Clearly, there are things that happen
solely because Itami thought they were funny—which they were and still are. Arguably,
he raises silliness to a high art form. It is hard to imagine a film like this
making it through focus groups and studio note-writing screenings today, so it
is enormously refreshing to have it back again.
Amid all the lunacy, Itami’s wife and muse
Nobuko Miyamoto shines like an Ozu heroine as the title noodle purveyor.
Tsutomu Yamazaki is wonderfully sly and hardnosed as Gorō, like a vintage Clint
Eastwood. A ridiculously young looking Ken Watanabe adds earnest vigor as Gun, while
a relatively youthful Kôji Yakusho becomes the symbolic face of the film as the
Yakuza in the white suit. In fact, Tampopo
is absolutely bursting at the seams with fine supporting performances, in both
the main narrative and the periodic interludes.
