Tampopo

by Yuki

If asked to summarize Juzo Itami's film "Tampopo," I would say it is a movie about ramen noodles: how to prepare them, how to serve them, and how to eat them. Or I could say something more general, like, it's a playful look at the role of food in human interactions. But having seen it several times over the past decade, these seem like grossly insufficient summaries for such a rich piece of work, and I spent my most recent viewing trying to figure out what exactly keeps me returning to this highly entertaining film. Certainly the variety of eccentric but believable characters, each with their unique regard for food, is a large part of the charm. For each of them food is an art form, a fetish, a craft to perfect, a measure of status, and always an undeniable part of their identity. But regardless of their individual tastes and peculiarities, Itami, who also wrote the film, never loses sight of the fact that food is a primal human need, and, that beneath the surface of the characters' sometimes reverent and bizarre relationship to their meals, we sense they are all hungry for something larger. Food is the vehicle by which they act out their needs. Importantly, these character's struggles are uncovered with a light touch, and perhaps it is this gentle handling that makes this film so compelling.

Many of the characters are in fact quite pitiful and tragic. Itami simply refuses to allow them any pity, and brings out the humor in their situations instead. The central story follows the friendship between Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki), an urban cowboy/truck-driver who rides into town on in his silver truck one rainy night, and Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), a widow who runs a dingy little ramen shop off the highway and lives upstairs with her young son. When Goro sees that her service is poor and the noodles are lifeless, he vows to help her turn her place into a first-rate ramen shop with a line around the corner. Itami makes great theatrical use of the tiny windowless ramen shop, where much of the action takes place, using the sliding glass door at the end to control the light and alternately flooding and draining it of brightness.

There are plenty of gorgeous shots of food, and an impressive range of cuisines is represented. The Japanese have long since mastered the act of appropriating different aspects of foreign cultures and molding them to their own tastes. The film reflects the many foreign cuisines that have been successfully incorporated into the daily Japanese diet, but also pokes fun at the customs and decorum the Japanese culture has assigned to these foreign foods. Itami probably chose ramen as his focus because of it is the common man's food, a meal you can order before even taking a seat at a crowded counter, and because it is originally from China. The director was, afterall, always very aware of the representation of Japan on an international level, and was careful to deconstruct the rigidity and mystique of the culture in a way that was accessible to audiences around the world.

Itami Juzo's visual style is diverse and malleable while remaining sparse. Set in Tokyo, the film has a stillness that is often associated with Ozu, with its small interior spaces and close camera shots. But Itami also seamlessly incorporates more playful riffs on Yakuza films, old spaghetti westerns, and vaudeville in various vignettes that are woven into the central story. The dark noodle shop for example, with its narrow wooden counter and stools lined up, echoes those images of a saloon out of an old Western. And Tsutomu Yamazaki's performance as the stoic Goro captures the grace and economy of the iconic American cowboy, translating it smoothly into a Japanese context.

Each vignette briefly reveals an entirely new world through the food that inhabits it. They are short and virtually silent, with little dialogue and no music, giving them each a concentrated, anticipatory feel. Most of the time, Itami transitions nicely to them, turning slowly from Goro and Tampopo to follow a character walking in the background. Other times, he simply cuts away with no transition, yet we don't feel jolted because each scene features such bizarrely captivating characters and situations, and of course, the theme of food knits them together. Itami's camera seems to float from place to place and meal to meal, shifting easily from a business luncheon in a posh French restaurant, to a buoyant crowd of hobos who pick through the trash for leftover bottles of fine wines, or to a tiny cramped apartment over the train tracks where a frail mother on her death bed suddenly stumbles to the kitchen to cook fried rice for her six kids, just before collapsing dead. The film goes through the high and low of the range. Yet through it all, we never quite lose
sight of the unrelenting urban landscape. Train tracks slice the screen, the highway curbs up into the sky, and towers loom silently in the background. Caught in the sprawl of Tokyo, these characters are disconnected from one another and from the uniform traditions that reign peacefully in the country. For the film is in many ways a study of modern urban life, and how the city at once brings people together while keeping them apart.