A Film Canon

Tampopo was playfully marketed as a noodle western, but it's more generically indeterminate than that might suggest. There's certainly a western element - what little narrative exists revolves around a mysterious stranger (Tsutomu Yamazaki) who helps restore a faltering noodle saloon - but it's part of a broader culinary panorama, positioned somewhere between documentary and cooking lesson, and gesturing towards the contemporary proliferation of idiosyncratic reality cooking programs, or even food blogging. As a result, the episodic structure can sometimes feel more like a series of episodes than a fully integrated film, so it's a testament to Itami's vision that it never feels stale or contrived, especially from the perspective of the 00s, during which the 'foodie' he elaborates - both amateur and aesthete - has become a commonplace figure. In part, this is because his interest in the aesthetics of Japanese cuisine is offset by his prescience for how easily it can be appropriated by a Western audience - this is about the time that sushi was gaining ground as an corporate status symbol - and it's here that the meditative solemnity of the mysterious stranger syncs so perfectly with his noodle mission, producing an absurd transcendence that does away with traditional Japanese spaces, and their ceremonial prioritisation of the floor, in favor of a semi-industrial, mildly steampunk universe that positions everyone beneath looming, though not necessarily threatening, infrastructure, and transforms the stranger's ride into the sunset into his ascent of an onramp. It also produces a delightful othering of Western cuisine - a combination of exoticism and domestication best expressed in a lesson given to Japanese women on Italian food, and how the etiquette of spaghetti differs from that of noodles.  In the same way, Itami draws out the sensual pleasure of food to an uncomfortable degree, in a series of sex scenes - the most striking in the film - that present eating as a form of oral sex, the mouth as an ejaculatory organ, and the whole obsessive ceremony surrounding food as the symptom of an oral fixation. For all that the concluding image of breast-feeding forms an appropriate figurative conclusion, Itami artfully and loosely gathers his various threads into the final scene, in which the stranger's protege, Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) finally opens her restaurant. Not only does her final perfection of the noodle dish cement it as an ideogram, as the traditional architecture that's been so conspicuously lacking from the film - and a kind of counterpart to the neotraditional architecture of her renovated bar, the culmination of an association between gleaming whiteness and steampunk transcendence - but several of the characters, or at least characters like them, turn up to inhabit it, clarifying Itami's loose structure as a tribute to the loose camaraderie of the noodle bar itself, to all the narratives that jostle against each other over the course of a single noodle.