Main Cast: Ken Watanabe, Nobuko Miyamoto, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Koji Yakusho, Rikiya Yasuoka
Release Year: 1986
Country: JP
Run Time: 114 minutes
MPAA Rating: NR
Plot
The sophomore directorial effort from ill-fated Japanese filmmaker Juzo Itami, Tampopo is an off-beat comedy featuring several intersecting stories all related to food. Tsutomu Yamazaki plays Goro, a truck driver who helps a young widow named Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) improve her noodle restaurant. Over the course of the film, the story drifts around, not only following the stories of Tampopo, her son, and Goro, but also a number of customers who come through the diner, including an old woman (Izumi Hara) who insists on squeezing the cheese at a market and a criminal (Ken Watanabe) with a food-based kink. Tampopo was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 1988 Independent Spirit Awards. ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide
Review
A gleeful thumb in the eye of Japan's money-mad 1980s culture, Juzo Itami's masterpiece subverts all that is right and proper with food and sex. Dubbed the first "noodle western," the film concerns a craggy-faced Shane-like stranger (he drives a semi instead of a horse) who aids a young widow named Tampopo as she struggles to make the best bowl of ramen noodles in town. On one level, the film works as an odd metaphor for Japan's newfound affluence, built on avid borrowings from other cultures. Each of the figures who gathers around to help Tampopo has a distinct national signifier: the belligerent, often drunk Piskin (not a common Japanese name) evokes Russia, the itinerant Noodle Master who sports a beret and speaks wistfully about French cuisine indicates France, and, of course, the cowboy hat-sporting Goro recalls the United States. Yet the film's loose structure, organized around seemingly unrelated vignettes, gives it a wider cultural resonance. From the scene in which the Man in the White Suit and his moll perform an unnatural act with raw egg to the corporate neophyte who upstages his boss with his expert knowledge of gourmet cuisine to the old woman who molests fruit in a grocery store, everyone in Tampopo is obsessed with food and uses it to stage their own quiet, often perverse protests against Japan's rigid hierarchical society. Like films from the French New Wave, Tampopo is a dizzying, kaleidoscopic inside joke. Itami includes references from the aforementioned Shane (1953) to Breathless (1960) to the later works of Luis Buñuel and Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (1971) (complete with a soundtrack drawn from Gustav Mahler's First and Third Symphonies). Tampopo is a wildly inventive, fantastically entertaining movie by a film master at the peak of his powers. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Tampopo begins when a pair of truck drivers, an experienced one named Goro and a young sidekick named Gun (played by Tsutomu Yamazaki and Ken Watanabe respectively), happen onto a decrepit roadside fast food stop selling ramen noodles. The business is not doing too well, and after getting involved in a fight, the heroes decide to help the widowed owner, Tampopo ("Dandelion", played by Nobuko Miyamoto), turn her establishment into a paragon of the "art of noodle soup making".
The main narrative is interspersed with stories involving consumables on several levels. The primary subplot involves a white-suited yakuza gangster (Koji Yakusho) and his mistress (Fukumi Kuroda), who find eyebrow-raising new ways to use food. Other satirical vignettes involve a lowly office intern who upstages his senior management superiors by displaying a vast and cultured culinary knowledge while ordering at a gourmet French restaurant; a housewife who rises from her deathbed to cook one last meal for her family; and a women's etiquette class in learning how to eat spaghetti properly, i.e. without a sound as "people from foreign countries would absolutely never forgive loud slurping". Another subplot involves a corner store clerk who has to deal with an older woman obssessed with squeezing food. The clerk's scene segues into a restaurant involving gangsters and stock market scams.
Further reading
Ashkenazi, Michael. "Food, Play, Business, and the Image of Japan in Itami Juzo's Tampopo." In Anne Bower, ed., Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film (New York: Routledge, 2004).
