This prologue suggests that Tampopo will be a movie about movies, and sure enough, that is what it is. Advertised as "the first noodle western," it pays amusing homage to the conventions that Hollywood and spaghetti Westerns thrive on, turning them on their heads by transplanting them to modern Japan and focusing most of the action on food, drink and a young woman's (Nobuko Miyamoto) dream of opening a great noodle shop with a little help from her friends. At various points Tampopo is a gangster flick, a road movie, a romantic melodrama, and a slapstick comedy, changing its mood, genre, and narrative arc as easily as the heroine changes the seasoning of her ramen broth.
Tampopo premiered in 1985, helping to initiate a long-lasting wave of movies about food, ranging from Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (1987) and Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) to Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci's Big Night (1996) and Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation (2006), plus a long list of animations and documentaries. Few other food movies have the gender-bending verve of Tampopo, though, and even fewer concentrate so deliciously on a single dish. Fortunately, that dish is noodles, which are capable of endless variations. The title character and her truck-driver sidekicks, Gorô (Tsutomu Yamazaki) and Gun (Ken Watanabe), demonstrate that as the picture proceeds.
It all begins when Gorô and Gun pull up at a ramshackle noodle restaurant for a quick meal. Trouble has broken out nearby, and Gorô unexpectedly has to save a little boy named Tabo who's being bullied by bigger kids, and then save Tabo's mother, Tampopo, from a boisterous customer causing a ruckus at her eatery. Gorô later tells Tampopo that something else needs saving: her noodle shop, which has promise but is languishing way below its potential. The title character is appealingly played by Nobuko Miyamoto, who was Itami's wife from 1969 until his death. The key role of Gorô is played to perfection by ruggedly handsome Tsutomu Yamazaki, internationally known for films by such major directors as Akira Kurosawa and Takashi Miike, and Gun is played by the young Ken Watanabe, who went on to appear in Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) and Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010), among many others.
Tampopo agrees to a noodle-shop makeover, checking out her competitors and recruiting an Old Master for advice and counsel. She emerges triumphant in the end, and so does young Tabo, although the suave-looking thug from the introductory scene meets a much sadder fate. The film's primary narrative is punctuated and interrupted by short episodes and vignettes about noodle-related topics as different as a dying woman's last meal and a lesson on how to slurp ramen silently. One of these digressions is a long kissing scene featuring a man, a woman, and an egg yoke that slides from one mouth to the other in an extended display of foodie eroticism.
Tampopo was the second feature directed by Itami, who started as an actor in well-known films like Nicholas Ray's historical epic 55 Days at Peking (1963) and Kon Ichikawa's romantic drama The Makioka Sisters (1983) before turning writer-director with his multi-award-winning comedy The Funeral (1984) at age 50. His portrayal of violent goons in the satirical crime picture Minbô no onna (1992) induced members of a yakuza gang to beat him up and slash his face, and his apparent suicide in 1997 may have been engineered by vengeful criminals. His death was a tragic loss to the newly energized Japanese cinema of the 1980s and 1990s.
Although his work is steeped in modern and traditional Japanese culture, Itami's skill as a satirist, humorist, and visual stylist gives his films a universality that cross national boundaries with ease. The appeal of Tampopo to Western moviegoers is enhanced by the music, which often quotes and echoes classics of the European symphonic repertoire, and by the acting, which develops real dramatic momentum while simultaneously poking fun at the customs and clichés of Hollywood fare.
Reviewing the American premiere of Tampopo in the prestigious New Directors/New Films series presented annually at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the influential New York Times critic Vincent Canby called it "buoyantly free in form" and "always ready to digress into random gags and comic anecdotes," and although he didn't find the film consistently amusing, he praised Itami for having a "funny sensibility." Roger Ebert gave Tampopo his highest rating in the Chicago Sun-Times, describing it as a "very funny movie...so completely submerged in noodleology [that] it takes on a kind of weird logic of its own." When the film returned to theaters for a brief run in 2016, Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern ranked it with Big Night and Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava's animated Ratatouille (2007) as one of the "peerless movies about food." Tampopo is the film Itami is best remembered for, and it should be required viewing for foodies everywhere.
Director: Jûzô Itami
Producers: Jûzô Itami, Yasushi Tamaoki, Seigo Hosogoe
Screenplay: Jûzô Itami
Cinematographer: Masaki Tamura
Film Editing: Akira Suzuki
Art Direction: Takeo Kimura
Music: Kunihiko Murai
With: Nobuko Miyamoto (Tampopo), Tsutomu Yamazaki (Goro), Ken Watanabe (Gun), Rikiya Yasuoka (Pisuken), Kinzô Sakura (Shôhei)
Color-114m.
by David Sterritt
