20 Feb Tampopo (1985)

New New Wave

Movies about other movies both fascinate and challenge me. The French “new wave” consisted of three types of ideas. They had notions about explicitly acknowledging the camera. That’s such an ordinary notion these days that it is impossible to appreciate. And in any case, no French thinker invented the idea.

A second component was the importation of key stereotypes from American movies applied in a “real world” context in a manner of folding fiction into reality (with the irony that the reality itself was fictional). This is what the average critic associates with New Wave.

The third component was the most trenchant, but is nearly impossible to recognise today, much less appreciate. Society was undergoing change — not in the radical way we all thought at the time, but in a more subtle, nuanced way: old means to accommodate damaged society were being replaced by new ones. Those new ones are immune to the old challenges and seem now like God made the world that way from the beginning. New wave film challenged these old strictures in a direct manner as its primary task. Since we can’t see the target, we miss the point all together and (in a sad irony) take the stories at face value.

Now into the long still tailwind enters Itami who makes a New New Wave film. It fits the mould in all three ways, but those three are more clearly seen by this American viewer.

We have the acknowledgment that it is a film, what with the camera whose presence creates the linkage among stories. And the copious references to past movies. In this case the references — I’m talking tone and style here, not story and character, include as many Asian (mostly Japanese) references as western.

We have the standard American film stereotypes. In French new wave that was the gangster, in Italian new wave, the cowboy. Here we have both. Film as food.

Film as food. Perfect, nuanced, deep film as similarly sacred food. This even starts with a film-within prologue with the gangster talking directly to us about the intent.

It is a novel idea, doing a new new wave film and making the references to the nature of film being about the nature of food. To make it explicit is a scene where older Japanese thickheads are embarrassed by a younger Japanese who is extensively familiar with the French vocabulary. There’s a similar scene on the Italian side, pungently misogynistic.

But it is the third element that fascinates me. That element does as much damage to all things in Japanese society as it can, those elements that are arbitrary yet solid. These are a little more accessible to this viewer than the fairly ephemeral concerns of Godard and Truffault.

Japanese in general inherit many things in their life from the Chinese giant. All these things they differentiate from their Chinese origins by extreme elaboration. Everything becomes stylised, so much so that the most pedestrian of Chinese things can become the basis and meaning for an entire Japanese life. Things like tea, flowers, drawing, packaging… Even a lowly bowl of soup, the soup that factory workers would eat at a diner becomes a matter of celestial obsession.

I’m not Japanese, so these stabs don’t tingle. But I can recognise them, most of them.

Along the way, we have — in the gangster, his moll and her idealisation as oyster and oyster girl— one or two of the most sensual cinema images in existence.

Posted in 2005

Seeing this 20 years later, I don’t think it has aged well. The problem is that the segues are too rough. Everything is related to food in some way, and often characters’ paths literally cross. But it seems more a film about film now and less about food. More about humanity and family.

Posted in 2025

Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.

IMDB