![]() “Flux Gourmet” is Strickland’s funniest film to date, with more outright jokes than its predecessors, and a few sublime visual gags, many of them involving Jan’s outfits (they were designed by Giles Deacon, with hats by Steven Jones). Those two sides of our nature collide in unexpected, infinitely variable ways. We are animals driven by lust, hunger and aggression, but also delicate creatures in love with beauty and abstraction. The film isn’t so much an allegory or fantasy as a witty philosophical speculation on some elemental human issues. But the unheard music of Stone’s lower intestinal tract is nonetheless a key structural element, organizing “Flux Gourmet” into an elegant fugue of contrapuntal themes: grossness and refinement pleasure and disgust appetite and discipline. ![]() This isn’t “ Blazing Saddles” audible flatulence is restricted to a single plaintive note, rather than a full symphony. There is obvious comic potential in his predicament, but Strickland doesn’t exploit it in the obvious ways. The resident doctor (Richard Bremmer) is a pompous boor, and Stones spends a lot of his time in the lavatory, the rest of it wearing the unmistakable grimace of a man holding back considerable gas. Digestive troubles, to be precise, which disrupt his sleep and sour his already gloomy mood. Meanwhile, a rejected band of culinary artists lurks in the shadows, threatening violence.Īll of this is chronicled - mostly in Greek voice-over with English subtitles - by a saturnine fellow named Stones (Makis Papadimitriou) who works as the institute’s “dossierge.” A writer by trade and a wallflower by temperament, he observes Elle and her colleagues, filming their meetings and performances, interviewing them together and taking notes on their squabbles. There’s also an element of sexual intrigue, as often happens when aesthetic passions are inflamed. Elle may be the leader, but her bandmates, a floppy-haired emo kid (Asa Butterfield) and an angular avant-gardist (Ariane Labed) have nascent creative agendas of their own. This tension exacerbates the rivalry within the group. Culinary sound collectives are the equivalent of rock bands, building walls of expressive noise from the whine of blenders and the sizzle of vegetables dropped in hot oil. ![]() Food, in the world of this film, is the music of love. Not the kind you eat - though there are some awkward dinner gatherings and episodes of surreptitious snacking. in “ The Duke of Burgundy” (2015) high fashion and Italian horror again in “ In Fabric” (2019) and now cuisine. Since then, Strickland has departed both from genre conventions and from known geography, conjuring parallel realities organized around particular aesthetic and erotic obsessions: Italian horror and sound design in “ Berberian Sound Studio” (2013) entomology and B.D.S.M. The first, “Katalin Varga” (2009) was a revenge drama set in Transylvania. What if the primary sensory goal of cooking were to stimulate the ears? What if you experienced a movie through your nostrils and taste buds, or felt it in your gut? These bizarre, intriguing questions are part of the foundation, the spine - the sofrito - of “Flux Gourmet,” the fifth feature by the British writer-director Peter Strickland.
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