Well, Peter Strickland‘s latest oddity is a difficult one to parse. Ever the devoted sensualist, the eccentric British director has – following forays into the realms of sound and touch in Berberian Sound Studio and In Fabric – turned his particular blend of Eurotrash style and kink towards the sense of taste. The result for many will lack any sense of taste whatsoever, but there’s no denying this strange concoction of high-brow framing and scatological humour is occupying its own cinematic realm, even by his curious standards.
The setting is a stately home, ran as a centre for ‘sonic cooking’. The director, Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie) offers one residency a year to one ‘culinary-music’ collective. This year’s group are Elle (Fatma Mohamed), Lamina (Ariane Labed), and Billy Rubin (Asa Butterfield), who quickly set about recording the sounds of whisked cream and bubbling jams. The residency is being documented by hack writer Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), who is suffering from chronic flatulence and becomes something of an unwilling performance art piece in itself.
If there’s an in-joke running through this deeply silly film is that it’s a satire of pretentious art in the guise of pretentious art. Everything is deeply stylised to the point of absurdity. Strickland has in the past frequently adopted the aesthetics of the Italian Giallo film and the deadpan theatricality of that other singular British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, but the two are even more pronounced here. The colours and sets pop like the wildest Dario Argento films, and the sexual tensions in the hermetic stately home retreat echo Greenaway’s genteelly pervy The Draughtsman’s Contract, while the twisted culinary themes hark back to The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover.
All the actors are more than in on the joke. Butterfield in particular is hilariously diffident as an egg fetishist who can be hypnotised by a whiff of vagina. The imperious Christie and the petulant, egotistical Mohamed get a continual running joke over the use of a ‘flanger’; Strickland’s penchant for sensory overload extending to the very texture of words. Papadimitriou is as close as Flux Gourmet gets to an audience surrogate, his complaining bowels providing their own Greek chorus, and a hefty clue about how we should feel about the whole thing.
It has to be said that Flux Gourmet doesn’t feel like quite as complete a film as the likes of Berberian Sound Studio or The Duke of Burgandy, as heightened as they are. The accusation of style over substance feels far more likely to stick here than it ever has before. Still, there are so many delightful little running gags and game performances that it hardly matters.
While outwardly chaotic, there is a sense of cyclical repetition to Flux Gourmet that makes clear it is far more deeply structured than it first seems. Strickland is a filmmaker who can indulge his craziest whims while keeping a control over the narrative itself. His latest may be the hardest to digest yet – and some will argue that it’s as palatable as regurgitated chick feed from a mother bird – but it’s so wholly and startlingly itself that it’s strangely easy to warm to in its own way.
Screened as part of Edinburgh International Film Festival