"Tampopo" (1987)

We typically consider eating a very impersonal, uninteresting act. We eat when we get hungry and we do it because otherwise we would perish. But eating is much more than a simple act. It has various qualities - erotic, sensual, comforting - and it’s an act defined by the cultural context in which we eat. Tampopo is about the pleasures of eating, and it’s about the food culture of Japan. At its center, the film tells the story of a man, Goro (Tsutomo Yamazaki), who helps a woman, Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), achieve her dreams of owning a great noodle restaurant. But the film jumps around to other vignettes reflecting the modern state of eating and cuisine in Japan, most memorably in a subplot about a fatalistic gangster finding deep connections with his moll through food. Some of the subplots are heavily sexual, finding the erotic attributes to eating. Others are about the divides in consumptive experiences, across class lines or generational gaps. But more often than not the film is concerned with the ways food connects and brings together people. Like in a scene where Goro introduces Tampopo to a group of homeless men, who she’s initially wary of before they prepare food that makes any differences between them matter little. In some ways, the film is like a western with a stoic, stetson-wearing man, coming to town, fixing some problems and walking away into the sunset, but Tampopo defies easy categorization, assuredly shifting between genres in order to examine the fullness of the consumptive experience of modern Japan. Tampopo is an inviting film; it’s involving and draws us into its world and its community, one built through a love of food and a passion for making it well. 

Grade: A