Tampopo revels in the senses and the ways in which people will go to great lengths to achieve sublime experiences. While most of this activity is centered around food, specifically ramen, this film is a wide-ranging exploration of the ways humans obsess over their favorite delights.
The story of Tampopo closely follows one woman, Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), whose name means “dandelion” and who runs a small ramen shop in a nondescript part of Japan. After one fateful night in which she receives a visit from a truck driver, she and this man, Gorô (Tsutomu Yamazaki), set about on a quest to make the best, most authentic version of the seminal noodle dish they possibly can.
Don’t be fooled. The ramen being discussed here doesn’t come in a styrofoam container, sold for pennies at the local grocery. This is the real deal: delicious, chewy noodles with a rich porky broth. Perfectly placed toppings like roast pork and scallions accentuate this most humble of masterpieces.
Which begs the question: Is making a movie about food the equivalent of that old saw “dancing about architecture”? Not quite, but there’s something of an unbridgeable gap here, and it is addressed in one of the earliest scenes. Gorô’s road buddy reads aloud a story of a very special visit to a restaurant, and all it does it make both men crazy with hunger. That’s the danger in watching Tampopo, too. The viewer might just shut it off and go eat.
Tampopo was released in 1985, but we live in a very different culinary era , one born of The Food Network and Anthony Bourdain, food trailers on every corner and nary a country that hasn’t had its cuisine turned into an offering for the American gullet. Even ramen has received this treatment, with shops popping up around the country serving authentic versions of the dish.
While Tampopo’s story is the center of the action, Tampopo disgresses often, showing vignettes of people engaging with food in a variety of ways. An old man is told he will die if he eats his favorite rich foods, but he does so anyway and nearly does. A mother is on the brink of death, and her husband implores her to make dinner in hopes of giving her a reason to live. She complies but leaves her family with this one last meal. A group of salarymen visit a French restaurant, and only the goofy young kid knows his way around the menu.
And then there’s the sex. It’s not blatant. It’s not gratuitous. Well, it is a little gratuitous. It bests 9½ Weeks for most over-the-top sexual congress featuring food. It really is something else. (You’ll never forget the image of two people passing an egg yolk back and forth from their mouths until it becomes too much!) The boundaries between distinct pleasurable activities quickly blurs.
The most telling feature of this world is the lengths people will go to in order to partake of such culinary (and other) delights. The best example is a group of homeless gourmands. These two attributes don’t normally go together, but this crew takes eating good food very seriously, even if that means rummaging through the trash bins of finer eating establishments around town. Whatever it takes to get the good stuff. In fact their leader helps Tampopo to perfect her broth, bring his refined palate to bear on this most worthy of causes.
As a part of the Criterion Collection, this edition features several excellent extras. Along with the standard making-of and interviews, there’s an excellent short piece all about the world of ramen. Tampopo could properly be termed a ramen movie, and the chefs interviewed in this segment are as obsessive as Tampopo herself. It’s a world of craft and dedication, and these real world ramenists represent well the movie they’ve all come to love.
At times Tampopo can feel like a bit of a hodge-podge, with elements of gangster, western, and coming of age films, but at its heart is about a women seeking to attain something for herself through the vehicle of making good food. Eating is a universal part of the human condition, and Tampopo lets us see just how meaningful it can be.
