Peter Strickland’s newest film played as part of this spring’s Seattle International Film Festival, Tony and I saw it separately, and enjoyed the cinematic feast with varying levels of indigestion. Regardless, we both agree that for those of certain appetites, it’s worth your time. With the film getting a theatrical run this weekend, we revisit our warmed-over festival reactions.
Flux Gourmet (2022 | United Kingdom | 110 minutes | Peter Strickland)
Tony said:
Peter Strickland hasn’t just made his best movie in Flux Gourmet. In one fell swoop, he’s winningly satirized his own tendency to infuse genre tropes with arthouse experimentation, enveloped it in an obscenely tasty surrealist visual palette, and crafted a comedy so funny and perfectly realized that it stands a real chance of making its architect a cult icon on the order of Peter Greenaway, John Waters, or Stanley Kubrick. No movie’s perfect, but the ratio of goal to accomplishment here comes so gloriously, wonderfully close I’m inclined to kick the hyperbole in high gear—and not just with the star rating.
Josh said:
Set during an experimental art collective’s stay at an elite monthlong creative residency in an English country manor house, Peter Strickland’s latest cinematic provocation will certainly raise both eyebrows and questions. Where is the line between pretension and performance in the art and culinary world? How does funding, access to donors, and the sway of mentorship influence emerging oddballs? Do negotiations of jealousy and competition spark or smother creativity in a group setting? But most pressingly: WTF must it have been like to be an actor on set for this deeply weird sendup of the modern art scene?
“All of the other residencies had gone so smoothly … ” intones Sonic Catering Institute’s house “dossierge” Stones (Makis Papadimitriou) as an introduction to his chronicle of four weeks that went anything but. Tasked with the unenviable responsibility of spending his waking (and sleeping) hours in the company of artists privileged to spend a month at an retreat run by a panda-eyed and outlandishly-attired Gwendoline Christie (as Jan, the Institute’s opinionated and meddlesome Director), this long-suffering digestively-distressed writer’s narration is our primary window into the happenings of a month in the company of a very strange band during their very unconventional residency. The self-serious trio — two women in Florence & the Machine cosplay (Ariane Labed, with the requisite angular hairstyle on electronics; Fatma Mohamed as the demanding leader) and one in double-denim (Asa Butterfield, swoopy bangs, an obsession with gear) — make noise installations from the distorted sounds of cooking while their leader writhes spasmodically, often covered in bodily excretions, before a rapt audience. All as a prelude to backstage orgies, naturally.
Between shows, the dossierge mines their individual backstories for potential rifts and follows them as they’re subjected to the stresses of guided role play and awkward after-dinner speeches for vampiric patrons. Along the way, there are bizarre seductions, squirm-worthy spectacles, internecine struggles, the looming threat of rival artists, quite a lot of intrigue about a flanger. Whether it’s absurd eroticism, the revolting surfaces of foods rendered in close-up, or the persistent scatalogical humor derived from one unfortunate man’s brave intestinal suffering, Strickland brings a degree of clinical distance to his depictions of these fully committed performances and scenarios that only heighten the already intense absurdity of the satire.
Overstuffed with visual gags, humorous and reflexive, it could be viewed many ways. A story of how one strictly vegetarian band’s culminating show came to include the sights and sounds of liver being rendered in a sizzling cast iron pan? The tale of how a failing flatulent writer came to understand himself and find creative purpose? Or just an excuse to get Brienne of Tarth into a silk bunny suit? After all, much of art is in the interpretation and it’s hard to argue with results.
Flux Gourmet screened as part of SIFF’s Official Competition and was part of our SIFF coverage; it plays locally this weekend at SIFF Cinemas.