As mainstream cinema becomes increasingly dominated by a select few types of films—superhero extravaganzas, nostalgia-exploiting IP tentpoles, and the occasional precious feel-good indie—the potential for genuine surprise has largely been lost. That’s by design: Studios recognize that the more customers are prepared for what they’ve paid to see and are able to comfortably remain one step ahead of those entertainments, the more likely they are to enjoy them—hence, for example, theatrical trailers and TV commercials that deliberately spoil crucial plot points, thrilling moments, and funny one-liners in advance. Predictability is safe and reliable, and thus the 2022 movie landscape is littered with projects designed to placate more than to shock and astonish.
Someone, however, apparently forgot to impart this message to Peter Strickland, the British-born auteur whose feature-length works—Berberian Sound Studio, The Duke of Burgundy, and In Fabric—are deliberately opaque and provocative. Strickland relishes operating on the fringe, where his anything-goes sensibility can flourish free from the constraints of the marketplace. He’s a legitimate iconoclast, interested in taking detours that are as unnerving as they are unexpected, and that remains true with Flux Gourmet (June 24), an art-world satire that’s so far removed from today’s multiplex fare that it feels like an active assault on the status quo. Deliriously demented and deviant, the writer/director’s latest is a feast of the bizarre, a tale that both indulges in absurdist pretension while simultaneously poking fun at it, and makes no concessions to conventional notions of good taste and lucidity.
Flux Gourmet is the rare film in which it’s impossible to guess what each new scene will bring. From the start, Strickland provides no solid ground on which to stand, throwing audiences into the action in medias res via the sight of food sizzling on a pan and boiling in a pot. A woman’s hand (replete with long, painted fingernails) waves over this stew like a witch tending to her cauldron. Then, we’re presented with a general context for these early sights: a manor house where outrageously dressed Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie) functions as the financial patron of culinary sonic collectives, which are groups determined to artistically explore and experiment with sounds made by and with food. Her current clients are a trio comprised of leader Elle (Fatma Mohamed), acolyte Billy (Asa Butterfield), and protégée Lamina (Ariane Labed), who are introduced posing onstage in all-white gowns before a table decked out with cooking utensils, vegetables, and electronic audio equipment.
Strickland doesn’t bother explaining what a sonic collective is or how it operates; rather, he simply drops viewers in the deep end, assuming they’ll eventually attune themselves to his weirdo wavelength. That may be a difficult task for some, given the sheer strangeness of everything taking place in Flux Gourmet. Nonetheless, it’s a daring gambit that by and large elicits curiosity regarding what the hell is going on in this secluded environ. As it turns out, the answer is that Elle, Billy and Lamina have been selected as Jan’s promising understudies, and by providing them with freedom and support, Jan hopes they’ll have some sort of inventive breakthrough regarding their objectives, which ostensibly have to do with traditional kitchen-related gender dynamics. This process, alas, is complicated by the fact that a rejected meat-centric collective known as The Mangrove Snacks is constantly terrorizing Jan, and that Elle resents Jan’s attempts to interfere with her creativity.
Jan and Elle’s disagreement—which revolves around the proper modulation of a flanger—is the nominal subject of Flux Gourmet, which charts the fluctuating tensions between out-there artists and those who financially back their imaginative endeavors. That conflict can’t help but come across as a cheeky articulation of Strickland’s own experiences, and the writer/director’s real-life history with a culinary-oriented collective known as “The Sonic Catering Band” only further underscores his personal connection to this surreal lampoon of performance-art nuttiness. Not that such backstory affiliations really matter; what’s of prime importance here is the prankster-ish bravado with which Strickland stages his madness, much of it set to a score (by the filmmaker, Stereolab’s Tim Gane, and A Hawk and a Hacksaw) that revels in distorted, abstract frying-and-bubbling noise.
With a degree of self-referential artifice that’s Strickland’s stock and trade, Flux Gourmet delivers a series of wacko left-field developments, be it Billy recounting a childhood encounter with an omelet-making chef that forever rocked his psychosexual world, or Elle’s decision to smear herself with what appears to be fecal matter in front of an audience in an act of incendiary offensiveness. The entire film is told through the eyes and narrated-in-Greek-voiceover words of Stone (Makis Papadimitriou), a “hack writer” hired by Jan to document the thoughts, feelings and deeds of the collective, whom he interviews one-on-one. Stone admits that he’s not a journalist, and that he doesn’t know the exact purpose he serves. He spends the majority of his time fretting greatly over his incurable gas, about which he expounds in detail, discussing the ways in which he hides his farts’ sounds and smells from those around him, and his dismay over the inability of pompously erudite Dr. Glock (Richard Bremmer) to find a remedy for his flatulence.
Stone’s internal affliction is a source of regular humor, and moreover, it speaks to Flux Gourmet’s fascination with internal and external artistic (and emotional) expressions and blockages. It also culminates with a public colonoscopy conducted without anesthesia, the inside of Stone’s organs projected on a wall for all to see. While it’s not always easy to grasp what Strickland is going for, that’s almost irrelevant, since the lunacy of every incident, speech, and routine is so great that it’s pleasurable enough to simply go with the freakish flow. From Christie’s cartoonishly outlandish costumes (including a hooded silken nightgown that makes her resemble Star Wars’ Bib Fortuna), to erotic montages of cooking food and performative transgressions that are followed by dreamy orgies, Flux Gourmet imagines the battles between art and commerce, the authentic and gimmicky, and collaboration and independence with witty audacity and at least one gastro-gross-out showstopper. Be sure to see it with an open mind—and on an empty stomach.
