TAMPOPO
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1987 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: High-calorie comedy about one restaurant's quest for the perfect noodle soup. Enjoyable comedy from Japan includes several comedy sketches unrelated to the main story, but which help to buoy it up.
Are you into food? I mean, are you REALLY into food? And when you get the food, is it important that everything about the food be just perfect? And, just by the way, are you really into Japanese food? If so, you will probably enjoy TAMPOPO, a new film from Toho Studios. Toho is known best in this country for having invented Godzilla and many of his tall friends. They also made the best of the samurai films. They now bring the plot of a samurai film and the subtlety of a Godzilla film to a comedy about the adoration of food.
Two truck drivers stop at a noodle shop somewhere in the outskirts of Tokyo. Even though the ramen is mediocre, one of the truck drivers finds himself in a fight defending Tampopo, the chef. He is knocked unconscious by five ruffians and when he awakes the next morning, Tampopo has an odd request: she wants our truck driver to become her master and teach her to make perfect ramen noodle soup. Thus Tampopo begins the arduous and occasionally dangerous journey toward perfection in even so apparently minor a task as noodle-making. In this task details that seem minor to gaijin-- foreigners like you and me--become very important. The plot from that point forward advances much like a samurai film. If thick noodles seem to make for a thin plot, they do. About half the movie is filled with tangential comedy routines that have little or nothing to do with the plot. Some are funny; some seem a little pointless to us impatient gaijin; almost all are on the subject of food.
One may question if the world really needed a comedy dedicated to gourmet cooking--particularly one that shows in detail the proper way to kill and drain the blood from a turtle. But TAMPOPO is a diverting hour or so. It is a pleasant (mostly) and forgettable film guaranteed to increase the business of local Japanese restaurants. Rate it a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. Don't see it on an empty stomach.
Mark R. Leeper
ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper
mtgzz!leeper@rutgers.rutgers.edu
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