In the decade since he broke out with 2012’s Berberian Sound Studio, Peter Strickland has steadily grown beyond his initial impression as a gifted pastichist of classic ’70s giallo into one of Britain’s most consistently engaging modern filmmakers. In recent years, he has expanded his palette of inspirational cues to encompass a wider field of European art cinema and pushed his neo-retro horror into increasingly ambitious and personal realms filled with surprises, dreamlike logic, and a fair share of sexual kinks. Flux Gourmet mostly leaves horror behind entirely, centering the loopy comedy that has bounced around the margins of all his prior work until his quirks become the primary element that propels the film.
Among Strickland’s key aesthetic signatures is his meticulous and intense use of sound, which here becomes the rooting focus for the first time since Berberian. Set in the Sonic Catering Institute, a converted aristocratic manor “devoted to culinary and alimentary performance,” the film follows a collective of noise and performance artists who make extreme music from the sounds of cooking, eating and digestion. Performances consist of microphones held closely to ingredients, blenders and the like as the blend of wet organic flesh and buzzing kitchen gadgetry is converted into sheets of noise modified by various effects knobs and pedals. Faked choking is magnified into a bestial gurgle, and in one scene a copious amount of tomato sauce is used to resemble a blood-spattered murder scene. Imagine ASMR if it had been invented by Throbbing Gristle, and you’ve got the aural picture. The nominal head of this group is militant vegetarian Elle di Elle (Strickland regular Fatma Mohamed at last promoted to lead), though they remain pointedly a democracy.
That aspect of band dynamics comes in for a great deal of satire. A democracy of artists and would-be visionaries guarantees that the simplest musical ideas become the subject of intense and wearisome debates. Things become even more absurd when the institute’s domineering head, Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), inserts herself into the squabbles to argue for her own aesthetic tastes, particularly her distaste for using flangers and other distortions that rob the original food sounds of their supposed essence. Later, she even becomes the group’s Yoko when she shacks up with their youngest member, Billy (Asa Butterfield), who freely talks about his Oedipal complex that renders him helpless to the older woman.
The film’s cinematography and production design emphasizes Strickland’s usual love of saturated, rich color, particularly in the spaces where collectives perform. Walls pulse with electric blue mildly offset with strips of yellow floor lighting that give everything the look of a particularly psychedelic Rothko. The precise framing of these spaces and the studiousness with which the film captures increasingly absurd theatrics recalls Ingmar Bergman’s color features and the analytical, deadpan comedy of Peter Greenaway. As in Strickland’s other films, Flux Gourmet exists outside an identifiable time, and even the wardrobe freely mingles eras; Billy, for example, has the swooping hair of an early-’80s New Romantic but dresses like a ‘70s proto-punk glam rocker.
At times, the film spins its wheels, and at this point the average person has seen countless more parodies of performance art than the genuine article. But Flux Gourmet ultimately steers out of the potential rut of this one-note parody via its bizarre narrative backbone: the travails of Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), a writer who accompanies the noise collective in the hopes of finding inspiration for his own work. Stones battles an indigestion problem that manifests as constant flatulence, which he either attempts to relieve during the din of the group’s shows or holds in to his great discomfort. It’s trademark Strickland absurdity, but it leads to a bizarrely touching final act in which Elle incorporates Stones’s gastrointestinal distress into the show, making art out of the thing he wishes to hide. Strickland’s filmography is dotted with gleefully staged murders and psychosexual hijinks, but the genuine gratitude that crosses the writer’s face when he learns that his shame can be made into something meaningful and, to someone, beautifully represents an oddly mature new emotional threshold in the director’s work.
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