Director: Juzo Itami
Starring: Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Ken Watanabe
I'm obsessed with ramen. No, I'm not referring to the cheap instant noodles that college students "survive" on, I mean real ramen. The noodle soup that is an obsession in Japan. I didn't know much about it until Kay and I went to the Slurping Turtle in Chicago and had my first bowl of authentic ramen. Since then I've become totally consumed by my quest to make the perfect bowl of ramen (something I'll likely be discussing in non-movie posts here this summer).
I read about this movie when it was mentioned in David Chang's Momofuku Cookbook (the beginning of my homemade ramen education). He said that this movie really made ramen more popular outside of Japan. I can see why. This film about a young woman's quest to open the best ramen shop in Japan is basically food porn. I kept finding myself craving every steamy bowl shown in the film. I wanted to taste the broth they were slurping so bad. It also managed to be quite educational about ramen techniques and how a ramen restaurant works (owning one here in St. Louis is a distant dream of mine).
The movie itself is really more quirky than laugh out loud funny. I laughed the most at a pseudo dream sequence in which a rival ramen shop attacks hers because she and her mentor dissed their soup the previous day. The structure of the movie is really quite experimental. There is a slow moving main plot about a trucker who helps this girl with her ramen. It has a sort of western/cowboy feel to it. Interspersed within this main story are random scenes of an attractive young couple with a really messed up food fetish. The strangest scene between these two involved them passing a raw egg yolk back and fourth with their mouths (with some really unsettling close-up camera work).
While the main plot is cute, the best part of the movie is an extended series of vignettes about people and food. The film will pick a random character, follow their mini story, then switch focus to a background character in that scene and follow them for a while, then switching again. I love when movies do this. This was a really creative way to form a sort of collage of individuals and their humorous adventures in food. My favorite included an old con man who pleaded with the cops to allow him to have one more bite of duck before hauling him away to the slammer.
While I can't quite say that this is a movie I would really recommend to anyone, it was definitely an interesting experimental comedy with a lot of nice footage of people eating tasty noodle soup.
Lesson learned: People in Japan take noodles very seriously.
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