Food in the Movies
October 11, 2003

The List:
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Comfort and Joy
Dinner Rush
Tampopo
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
Ravenous
Delicatessen
How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman

In Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a bunch of hoity-toity friends gather at a sumptuous table to dine, but then are interrupted over and over again and actually never get to eat.

Comfort and Joy, a terrific Scottish comedy by Bill Forsyth, is actually a food film. I don't normally like to call films "charming," but this one is. A lonely radio personality in Edinburgh named Dickey Bird witnesses a group of masked thugs destroying an ice cream truck. As a result Dickey finds himself in the middle of a feud between the city's two major ice truck fleets, controlled by feuding mob families. The thought of mafia in Scotland is silly enough but it gets better: Ice cream is used as a threat, ice cream trucks hijacked and destroyed, and it's up to Dickey Bird to quell the feud before the mobsters quell Dickey. Included is a recopied and step-by-step technique for making fried ice cream, which plays a pivotal role in the movie.

There's the true classic Tampopo, A quintessential food film and maybe the funniest movie to ever come to the west from Japan. It's an episodic comedy about a trucker, posturing like Clint Eastwood in the Spaghetti Westerns, who rides into a small town in his semi truck in search of the perfect noodle shop. Finding none, he encounters sweet young Tampopo, and together they begin a quest to create the perfect bowl of noodle. I know it sounds silly and Japanese-y, but it's an odd precursor to things like Iron Chef and a very adept satire of Japanese culture, where food is almost a religion. And as a bonus, we get step-by-step teaching on the quixotic task of making the perfect bowl of noodles. This film will make you ravenous.

Dinner Rush is a terrific recent indie film. It's like a little bistro you've heard tell of—hard to find but worth the search. Danny Aiello plays Louis, the owner of Gigino's, a traditional old-world Italian eatery in Tribeca—you know, Pasta fagioli and linguini with clams and the like. But he has two problems: First, Louis' son Udo has become a brilliant and trendy chef and he wants to put Gigino's on the foodie world map. Second, a couple of thugs from Queens want to add some class to their reputation so they're trying to muscle Louis out of his life's work. And poor Louis only wants a decent meatball; he has the sous chef Duncan prepare old-fashioned dinners for him behind his son's back. It's a loud New York life film, but it has a lot of heart, and one of the dandiest endings I've seen in a good long time. And anyone who's worked in one of those jam-packed little urban restaurants will get those dinner rush butterflies all over again—it's that authentic.

And the food, good lord, the food. The movie's Web site has recipes for food from the film: fusilli con melanzana with fresh basil and ricotta; grilled pears with robiola cheese and speck; panelle, wild mushroom and chickpea fritters. Now this is a food movie.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is a Peter Greenaway film that's about as decadent and voluptuous as a food film can get. It involves a gangster who trots out his trophy wife every night to the same schmancy restaurant to gorge himself like a Roman senator. There's nasty violence, explicit sex, and lots and lots of food. It's not an easy one, very exotic, but deep down it's one of the most sophisticated social satires you'll ever see.

There was a whole little community of film artists and gourmands at the University of California Berkeley for a while in the seventies and eighties, including Les Blank and Werner Herzog, who would the great old Chez Panisse and pal around with Alice Waters. A number of films came out of this love of food and film, some good, some not so, but all will make you hungry.

Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers: Three legendary avant-garde filmmakers, Les Blank, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders, engage in a rambling roving dinner with Alice Waters, each course full of garlic from the appetizers to the dessert.

And speaking of Werner Herzog, here's a great curiosity: Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. It's a short in which Werner Herzog actually eats his shoe. Here's the story: when Herzog was teaching at Berkeley, His student Errol Morris told him about an idea he had to make a documentary about pet cemeteries. The story goes the Herzog told Errol Morris that if he could successfully make this odd idea into a film, Herzog would eat his shoe. Well, Errol Morris went on to make the movie, Gates of Heaven and several other terrific documentaries, and Herzog kept his word: he and Alice Waters sautéed the shoe and served it with an herbed broth, Herzog chose the tenderest of his old work boots and ate it on stage at a lecture hall at Berkeley, Les Blank filmed the whole thing.

There's almost a sub-genre of cannibal gourmet films, which not only point up people eating people, but ways of making it delicious. We have of course the three-course Hannibal Lector series of films, which get increasingly grotesque with each sequel, but they're just the start.

There's the thoroughly grotesque movie Ravenous, a recent film starring Guy Pearce before he became famous in LA Confidential, about a sort of Donner Party but with vampires thrown into the mix. There's so much cannibalism that it becomes absurd, and it's actually a curiously intriguing film, but it's not for the faint-hearted.

Delicatessen is an odd sort of post-apocalyptic fable about a Deli owner who gets paid in grain to serve his customers human sandwiches. It's French and it's weird, it might remind you of the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil, for better or worse; but hey, it's for those with adventurous palates, at its heart is the satiric notion that the French can make anything taste good.

There's a Brazilian satire called in English How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman. We're back in the age of the conquest of the Americas, the sixteenth century, and a so-called "civilized" French explorer tries to befriend a tribe of cannibals. Oh they befriend him all right, they put him up in a comfy hut, give him a bride, feed him really well, and of course they make him part of the tribe, by making him the main course.

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