Tampopo (1985)

"You helped me find my ladder"

From birth to death, we all have the need for food in common. Tampopo put a weird twist on the food genre by combining it with a Western, with the emphasis on weird. The film’s main course was the search for the perfect bowl of ramen. The side dishes ran the gamut from heartwarming to sexual food fetishes. When the character in the opening scene breaks the fourth wall, hold onto your popcorn because you are in for a wild ride.

On a dark and stormy night, two truck drivers ride into town looking for a place to eat. Goro wears a cowboy hat and his trusty young sidekick loves ramen so they stop at small shop. Tampopo is a widow with no experience cooking ramen and it showed. Goro and Gun give her advice on her ramen and before long are helping her to improve. Team Ramen begins to expand to include a homeless ob/gyn, a chauffeur, and a drunken contractor. And this is the most normal story in the film.

Just when you think it couldn’t get any weirder, director Itami Juzo says, “Hold my Heineken.” Like tag team wrestling, a passerby will be tagged in and their story of food begins. Professional and international dinner etiquette, con artists, fetishes, first times, and last times all pop in and out with circle wipes. Tampopo delves into the connections we have with food and dining. How much do we savor and pay attention to what we eat? How memories and food are tied together in a family. There were some scenes with the 18+ food fetish couple that I would rather not have seen but for the most part the vignettes were PG, kooky, and entertaining. When the last breaths of a character were for a wild boar intestines recipe you know the director is hard core about food. While I found myself invested in one of the romances, the true love of the film was for food.

Tampopo will not be for everyone, nor will all the stories in it. I enjoyed Team Ramen as they explored the world of ramen, experimenting, failing, improving, and building a comradery. Some of the vignettes were more humorous than others, but overall, I found it quirky and entertaining. As someone who grew up watching westerns with my dad, I fully expected one character to shout out, “Come back Shane!” at the end of the film. If you are in the mood for something different, grab a snack, and settle in for a film dedicated to food in the many ways we celebrate it.

7 February 2024

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English tramslation of clinchamps's review: La cuisine est ici le chemin de la vie,...I agree!

Tampopo (Dandelion in Japanese) holds a small ramen gargotte. She is a widow with a son who is bullied by his friends from primary school. One day a tanker truck stops and the driver and his teammate go to eat. As the two men find ramen bad and they seem to know anything about them (especially Goro the cowboy-looking driver), she asks them to teach her.

This learning will give rise to several digressions all as tasty as each other, because for the Japanese, Cooking is an art in its own right, like Pottery or Sabre and this film is the very essence of Japan. The narration is anything but linear: we walk through this film by crossing different characters more or less connected to the story, or even not at all like the yakuza in white suit and his mistress. Cooking as an art where all the senses are put to use is the very plot of the film (the yakuza and his mistress prove to us that the pleasures of the palate are closely linked to other pleasures!)

We meet all walks of life from clodos to a rich bourgeois and the common link is always the culinary art. Little by little the gargotte of Tampopo will become a small restaurant where people queue, because everything is linked: the appearance of the kitchen, the look of the stove make the kitchen even better! And as this film is Japanese, of course the ending is perfect, positive, (Ah! the scene of learning how to eat spaghetti without noise, or the one where tramps sing...) happy, but with a light and sweet melancholy, when the tanker goes away for the last time on its highway!

This movie is a magic potion, a slice of pure happiness that should be reimbursed by Social Security. Impossible not to finish it with a smile on your face with the irrepressible desire to put yourself in the stove.


By the way, Miyamoto Nobuko is the former wife of the late director Itami Juzo...

According to a online video interview of Miyamoto Nobuko about the movie, she said that her husband kept asking her about her opinion as to what people would think about a movie about this topic or that topic, or a movie about ramen.

Her rely to him was, "Why don't you just make the movie and see what the people think about it."...so he finally did and created a comedy to last an eternity!

There was criticism about the vignette not being 'cohesive'...it is a comedy! It doesn't have to be cohesive!

Itami Juzo is partially mocking the chefs and their secrets to making the perfect ramen. He is also portraying the Japanese city as the scene of a Western; with cowboys riding delivery trucks rather than horses; with individuals becoming jilted at the tought somenes 'stole' their ramen secrests, which they did, time and time again!

One reviewer complained about a turtle being killed; HOW DO YOU THINK ANIMALS ARE PREPARED BEFORE YOU EAT THEIR MEAT??

Cows are killed before the beef in your grocery store sells it to you, and pigs are slaughtered

Someone kills the cow and processes the meat into hamburgers!

The same process is done for pigs, lamb, birds, sheep, et al. Animals 'die' and their meat processed before you eat it!

The main and support cast worked well together and there was just enough drama to make the comedic parts funnier.

There was also criticism of the egg and oyster: take alook at daytime Japanese television and teh 'egg and oyster' sccenes are NOTHNIG campared to daily Japanese sexual hijinxs on Japanese daytime television!

This film reminds me of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)" and
It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963)...so funny and so universal!

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