Double Feature: Two International Films in the Food Genre
In the spirit of the new season of The Bear, let it rip!
Sorry for the delay. I recently read a post on another blog, Bookbear Express, that jolted me. The first two lines inspired me to pick this up again.
I write for exactly five people. The fact that they keep reading my writing is an enormous relief
I feel similarly despite having only a fraction of Ava’s subscribers. To be clear, I’m humbled by anyone who has read anything I’ve written or hit the subscribe button. The point is that I have a handful of opinions in mind when I’m writing (including my own) and zooming out has helped me gain perspective and reconnect with something that’s challenging but also fun. To anyone new since 2022, welcome! Feel free to shoot me a line anytime with a movie you’ve recently seen.
This new post is about food. It’s something we need to consume to survive but it’s also a centerpiece for connecting with others. Saying, “let’s grab dinner” is the adult version of “let’s hang out.” It’s also a cultural attraction. Everyone travels differently, but many travelers plan at least a few of their meals ahead of time. Everyone wants to try something that they can’t find at home and in the process we learn about local ingredients, famous national dishes, and unfamiliar cooking styles. Maybe we learn something new that we tell our friends ad nauseum about upon returning, or maybe we just discovered a favorite new cuisine.
We all have favorite foods and many of them are influenced by what we grew up eating. Certain dishes can be time machines, transporting us back to core memories or how we felt at a certain place or time. For me, that’s always been my mother’s pai gu tang, a traditional pork rib soup with daikon and goji berries. Each household has different variations on how to prepare a certain dish and sometimes those recipes get passed down, and sometimes they don’t and you search for them endlessly. Michelle Zaunier (Japanese Breakfast) asks herself in her memoir Crying in H Mart, “Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?” After her mother passed away, she found herself clinging on to what was left of her mother’s Korean recipes as a way to remember what home felt like. On her many trips to H Mart, a sanctuary for Asian food lovers, she saw many others at the food court who were just like her, searching for a familiar meal.
During my Mexico trip last winter, the group of friends I went with heavily debated one thought experiment for hours: if you could only eat three cuisines for the rest of your life, what would they be? Everyone universally selected the cuisine they grew up eating as their first choice. The next few choices now need to be strategic. Usually you have to select something with enough variety and vegetables so you can remain healthy and not bored. And the last choice usually contains a guilty pleasure food that you can’t live without. Maybe that’s pasta for some people, for me it was cheeseburgers, which set off another debate. K furiously defended that he could go the rest of his life without eating another cheeseburger. “You’re so full of shit,” I said, grinning across the table as we finished our mole poblano. In the end, we each went around and said what our choices were. Mine are Chinese, Japanese, and American. What are yours?
In 2022 FX came out with The Bear, a TV show centered around the back kitchen of a Chicago beef restaurant and the perfection-obsessed culture of the restaurant industry. I’ve probably annoyingly forced this show upon my friends enough times to make them not want to watch it. It just really resonated with me. Not because I’ve worked in a restaurant kitchen before (I haven’t), but I’ve really just come to love and appreciate every character in it. For a show that focuses so much on the search for perfection, it really manages to empathize with misfits and making mistakes. Most of the characters who work at the restaurant wouldn’t have fit in anywhere else in the world and that’s what makes them family. Many of the themes are also universal, including the search for purpose and self-validation. The second season was released this past weekend and the premiere was the most watched Hulu premiere in FX history. By the weekend it was all over and I’m patiently waiting for enough time to lapse so that I can re-watch it.
Food is so pervasive to our everyday existence that I was surprised there aren’t more films wrapped around this concept. Perhaps it’s because it’s so ordinary. Consuming it becomes ritualistic and we forget how important it is to our lives. In recent years, it’s been interesting to see more scripted content being developed around the idea of food, such as The Bear and The Menu, in a genre so defined by documentaries and reality competition shows. Here are two international films that use food as a way to connect with the audience as well as their characters.
Tampopo (1985, directed by Juzo Itami)
There are tons of memorable lines from the late Roger Ebert’s writing but one that stuck out to me after watching Tampopo was in his review of My Neighbor Totoro.
Here is a children's film made for the world we should live in, rather than the one we occupy. A film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults. No fighting between the two kids. No scary monsters. No darkness before the dawn. A world that is benign.
I found that this applies to many Japanese films but especially Tampopo. There might be some violence in Tampopo but almost every character in this film is good-natured. Everything is exactly where it should be. In its marketing, the film was billed as the first “ramen western”, a clever play on the spaghetti western genre popularized in Europe and imported into Hollywood. The movie parodies characters commonly found in westerns, but western culture remains pervasive throughout.
To even begin to describe this movie is a difficult task. This movie is absurd, but it’s also such a fun viewing experience. It’s weird but not in an inaccessible way. There isn’t really a genre to hang its hat on, as it touches so many, from slapstick comedy to gangster to elements of horror. I can’t remember another movie I’ve seen that follows a straight narrative but is also overlaid with vignettes of other stories that have no bearing on the overall plot.
The main plot begins with two truck drivers, Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki) and Gun (a young Ken Watanabe), who stop by an unassuming ramen shop on their way to their final destination. The owner, Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), is a widow and also a fantastic cook in every aspect except for ramen. As she serves them two hot bowls of ramen, Goro gets into a confrontation with some drunk patrons and eventually gets his ass handed to him. The next morning as he’s leaving, Tampopo runs up to him and begs for him to help her turn her restaurant into a well-respected ramen shop. So begins the story of searching for the best broth, noodles, and ingredients to create the perfect bowl. What comes next is an incredibly entertaining movie that in many ways mirrors our favorite comfort foods. It’s fragmented, gluttonous, and feel-good in all of the best ways.
One of the most intriguing parts of Itami’s most famous work is the circumstances around his death. He died of suicide in 1997 at the age of 64; however, there has since been evidence that the yakuza was involved in staging his death. Itami was always a risktaker, satirizing the yakuza in his film Minbo: the Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion, which ultimately led to a gruesome assault that involved his face being slashed. Decades after his death, a former yakuza member admitted to being there the night Itami died and how they pressured him to jump off a rooftop at gunpoint. While Itami’s legendary career was cut short, we still have his films to cherish.
The Lunchbox (2013, directed by Ritesh Batra)
In Mumbai, there are over 250,000 lunchboxes delivered from homes and local restaurants to the workforce every day. It’s called the dabbawala system and gained recognition in the west when Harvard Business School published a case study on how efficient they were (a dabbawala is a lunchbox courier who transports the tiffins to and from office buildings). It’s been said that the system only makes one mistake in every six million deliveries. What’s crazy is that the containers need to be returned to the homes they came from the same day.
This film centers around the improbable. Ila (Nimrat Kaur) is a young woman who wants to rekindle the spark in her marriage and decides to ask her neighbor for recipe ideas so that she can surprise her husband with delicious food. The first lunchbox gets misdelivered to Saajan (Irrfan Khan), a lonely accountant nearing retirement. What starts off as a mistake slowly turns into a budding friendship as they start trading notes via the lunchbox. Ila’s husband doesn’t even notice he’s been eating someone else’s homecooked food and constantly sneaks out late at night for “work”. The notes passed between Ila and Saajan are innocuous at first, commenting about each other’s day and the food Ila cooks, but they slowly turn into a way for each other to express themselves. They begin talking about past events in their lives, Ila’s failing marriage, secrets, and regrets. There must be something cathartic about sharing a message in a bottle with a total stranger. In one of his letters, Saajan notes, “I think we forget things if we have no one to tell them to.”
This movie can be as straightforward or profound as the viewer wants. At its core it’s about a new connection between two people that’s held together by a near-perfect system. The anonymity of their letters allow them to reveal things they wouldn’t reveal to people closest to them. Eventually, there’s a certain sense of closeness and familiarity between them that leads to an inevitable question mark. Should we meet in real life?
Occasionally, I’ll see a missed connection post on Reddit or Instagram that are eventually resolved through today’s technology and social media. They usually start off like this: someone met a person they really had a vibe with at a music event or a cafe, only to realize later that they regret not asking for a phone number. They then post on the appropriate forum in the hopes of locating that person. Maybe this is the person they’ve been searching for their whole life! Of all the random things that happen to us on a day to day basis, it’s only natural to connect the dots and think it’s fate. I’ve always wondered what happens down the line after one of these successful connections. Do they end up as soulmates? Or were they searching for a specific version of a person they met on the dancefloor.