TAMPOPO Movie Review

Dandelion

When it premiered here in 1986, this second film from the late Juzo Itami (his debut, The Funeral, caused something of a modest scandal in Japan) seemed all the sweeter for being so thoroughly unexpected. Yet recent, repeated viewings—minus the element of surprise—reveal Tampopo to be a marvel of comic structure so inventive, knowing, sweet, and tart that this trailblazer of the recent flood of “food” movies feels more like a classic than ever. The movie's heroine is Tampopo (Dandelion), a woman whose noodle shop is failing because she's a terrible cook. To the rescue comes Goro, a swaggering, macho truck driver with cattle horns on the cab of his truck, who makes Tampopo's cause his own. Swearing to make her noodles the best in the east, Goro and Tampopo embark on a fantastic gastronomical odyssey of epicurean research that keeps spinning the picture's plot off into darkly hilarious shaggy-food stories. Tampopo is a celebration of movies, food, and sex, and Itami's whirling vision of a ravenous, unrepentantly insatiable world is never interested in separating the three. Tampopo is played by the wonderful Nobuko Miyamoto (Mrs. Itami), who would later go on to become the closest thing to a Japanese superwoman as a corruption-buster in Itami's subsequent, controversial comic exposés A Taxing Woman, A Taxing Woman's Return, and Minbo.

NEXT STOP … The Funeral, A Taxing Woman, Babette's Feast

1986 114m/C JP Ken Watanabe, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Koji Yakusho, Rikiya Yasuoka, Kinzo Sakura, Shoji Otake; D: Juzo Itami; W: Juzo Itami; C: Masaki Tamura; M: Kunihiko Murai. VHS, LV, Letterbox REP