Music is emphatically not the food of love in visionary British writer-director Peter Strickland’s latest exotic feast of a movie, which takes place in a parallel universe where musicians routinely blend culinary composition with avant-garde performance art. Dialing down the giallo-infused mania and retro-horror homages seen in previous works like Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and In Fabric (2018), Flux Gourmet instead aims for a kind of darkly satirical whimsy, spiced with some gently macabre touches and psychological thriller overtones. Featuring a starry international cast, including Gwendoline Christie and Asa Butterfield, Strickland’s fifth dramatic feature world premieres in Berlin this week.
With voluptuously weird curios like The Duke of Burgundy (2014), Strickland has proven himself arguably the most singular auteur voice in British cinema since Peter Greenaway, a clear stylistic ancestor. But his baroque visual tapestries and artful pulp-genre riffs sometimes fall short of his grand ambitions, and so it proves with Flux Gourmet. Despite some delicious ingredients and a richly flavoured premise, this dish feels undercooked and half-digested. With North American distribution rights already signed up by IFC Midnight, this cult-leaning curio will generate healthy buzz based on the director’s track record and stellar cast. But Strickland is essentially an experimental film-maker and, by definition, experiments sometimes fail..
Like most of Strickland’s work, Flux Gourmet takes place in a kind of hallucinatory memory palace of 1970s Europe, the location and era purposely vague, but knowingly steeped in the analogue visual grammar of vintage British cinema. The action unfolds entirely at a culinary-themed art institute in a grand manor house, somewhere in a rural England of the imagination. The current artists in residence are a trio of volatile food-punk performers led by Elle di Elle, played with riveting ferocity by Romanian diva and regular Strickland muse Fatma Mohamed. Her musical collaborators include her ex-lover Limina (Greek Weird Wave stalwart Airane Lebed) and Billy (Butterfield), who she routinely berates as talentless flunkies.
Returning for her second film with Strickland, Game of Thrones and Star Wars veteran Christie plays the head of the institute, Jan Stevens, an imperious matriarch with a comical fondness for outlandish outfits and headgear, courtesy of fashion designer Giles Deacon and milliner Stephen Jones. Hired to document the group’s work at the institute is Stones (Greek theatre actor Makis Papadimitriou), a downtrodden writer with painful, embarrassing digestion issues that keep him in a state of constant mortal dread.
Partly inspired by Strickland attending a month-long residency at a real art collective with culinary connections, Flux Gourmet is an amusingly acerbic in its insider depiction of bickering, egocentric artists and their pretentious, overbearing patrons. According to his Berlinale press notes, which should perhaps be taken with a generous pinch of salt, Strickland also intends this film to counter the lazy comic mockery of flatulence, food allergies and digestion problems in cinema. This appears to be a personal soapbox issue for the dyspeptic director, a cause close to his heart. Quite literally.
Flux Gourmet is brimming with juicy dramatic and satirical potential – backstage orgies, tortoise-throwing terrorists, the eternal power struggle between art and money, a bizarre role-playing game set in an imaginary supermarket, mounting sexual tension between Billy and Jan, the questionable ethics of using transgressive taboos in art, and more. But Strickland struggles to corral all these wild tangents into a coherent whole, instead lumbering his charismatic cast with too many long, stilted conversations that feel stagey and unconvincing, breaking the mesmerising spell of the film’s more effective scenes. The humour is simply too tepid to build up much comic momentum, the horror-lite touches too mild to spook viewers.
By far the most powerful stand-alone sections in Flux Gourmet are the culinary musical performances themselves, avant-garde sound art pieces that incorporate the slicing of vegetables, sizzling saucepans, whirring blenders and boiling fluids into a heavily percussive, electro-acoustic, noise-rock soundtrack. Mohamed gives a fiercely committed performance in these scenes, thrashing around naked in blood-red sauces or smearing her body with a range of foodstuffs, sometimes crossing the line between punk provocation and scatological shock tactics. Strickland seems to be at his most sure-footed during these explosive sonic interludes, and more of them would have made for a stronger, bolder film.
Typically for Strickland, the score features an impeccably curated guest list of left-field composers including members of Stereolab, A Hawk and a Hacksaw and Nurse With Wound, alongside archive pieces from the director’s own long-running musical side project, The Sonic Catering Band. As he proved with Berberian Sound Studio, Strickland is forensically fastidious about sound design, and he includes amusingly detailed technical credits for the Hungarian post-production team who added found sounds and wildlife recordings to his film’s meticulous acoustic mix. There is an impressive array of talent on and off screen here, but not enough to prevent Flux Gourmet from leaving a disappointing aftertaste.
Director, screenwriter: Peter Strickland
Cast: Gwendoline Christie, Fatma Mohamed, Ariane Labed, Asa Butterfield, Makis Papadimitriou, Richard Bremmer, Leo Bill
Producers: Serena Armitage, Pietro Greppi
Cinematography: Tim Sidell
Editing: Matyas Fekete
Costume design: Saffron Cullane, Giles Deacon
Production design: Fletcher Jarvis
Sound design: Tim Harrison
Music: Jeremy Barnes, Heather Trost, Roj, Cavern of Anti-Matter, Dan Hayhurst, The Sonic Catering Band
Production companies: Bankside Films (UK), IFC Productions (US), Blue Bear Film & TV (UK), Head Gear Films (UK), Metrol Technology (UK), Lunapark Pictures (UK), Red Breast Production (UK)
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Encounters)
In English
109 minutes
