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Friday, 24 June 2022

Flux Gourmet Review

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Flux Gourmet debuts in select theaters on June 24, 2022.

Director Peter Strickland knows how to make textures pop. His 2014 romance The Duke of Burgundy explored a BDSM dynamic in a lavishly furnished cottage. His 2018 follow up In Fabric was about a haunted red dress. Both productions incorporate physical sensations to a vast degree, while his earlier film, Berberian Sound Studio — about a foley artist creating sounds for an increasingly disturbing Giallo using vegetables — had a distinctly auditory focus. His latest, Flux Gourmet, takes after the latter, but equally builds on his collective body of work. It's about a group of “sonic caterers,” an art form combining food and acoustics, which Strickland appears to have created whole cloth, and which he subsequently turns inside out. The movie doesn’t always work, often opting for removed observations in between scenes of performative exploration. However, when it occasionally embodies the creative perspective of its characters, it becomes a unique sensory experience.

The images and sounds that introduce us to Flux Gourmet live somewhere between glossy and occult. Under bright studio lighting, meat crackles in a pan, and a feminine hand with long, deep-black nails hovers over a steaming pot, like a fairytale witch cursing a bubbling cauldron. Before long, the full setup comes into view. A table with cooking paraphernalia. A trio of performance artists. A curious journalist. An eager audience. And adorning the table on all sides: cables and microphones, capturing the culinary process from the inside out, sometimes inserted into the dishes themselves. This is the Sonic Catering Institute, an exclusive and somewhat cult-like artistic workshop led by Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), whose intended explorations of food, sound, and gender roles eventually clash with those of her students: Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed), Lamina Propria (Ariane Labed), and Billy Rubin (Asa Butterfield).

Present to record the goings on at the institute is a meek print journalist named Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), the ostensible POV character, whose self-effacing Greek voiceover introduces us to the artists’ repetitive routines, and to Stones’ own dietary troubles. Simply put, he’s embarrassingly flatulent, and thus, a bit of a disruption to the creative process. The institute’s elderly, pompous physician, Dr. Glock (Richard Bremmer), tries to diagnose him, but mostly ends up berating him and exposing his insecurities. Before long, even Glock’s ongoing treatment of Stones starts to become absorbed by the trio’s abstract performances, leading to a delightful (if short-lived) subplot about a public colonoscopy. One imagines there’s an allegory hidden somewhere in Stones’ bowels, about what art looks like when digested by the common man, but like his eventual diagnosis, it’s more of an irritant than a shocking discovery lying in wait.

For the most part, the premise exists in service of theatrical vignettes, where the artists blur the lines between emotion, food, and sound, resulting in a deviously enticing sound mix led by designer Tim Harrison and mixer Cassandra Rutledge. Mechanical feedback fuses with organic squishing and smushing, resulting in an uncanny aural tapestry that makes you want to pick apart its elements. But listen closely enough, and even its most jagged and unruly moments begin to feel like music — in particular, a performance that incorporates a blender, whose deafening hums are manipulated to resemble Screamo tracks. As far as human sensations go, combinations like sight and sound, sight and touch, and even touch and taste feel like they can be easily paired, and understood in tandem, with one giving way to the other. Taste and sound, however, rarely go hand-in-hand, which makes Strickland’s choice of fictitious artistry feel so fascinating.

Flux Gourmet is only ever alluring when its made-up artform is front and center during surreal vignettes.

What is less fascinating, however, is the way he attempts to deconstruct his own fictitious artform — as a creative metaphor that can be cut and pasted onto any creative process — via isolated interviews where Stones tries to get to the bottom of Elle, Lamina, and Billy’s past experiences. These scenes, which consume most of the film’s runtime, function as psychoanalytical framing for the exercises we see the artists perform. While they certainly inform each character’s perspectives during discussions and disagreements, the arrival of these lengthy interviews can’t help but feel like a disruptive toddler changing the channel just when things are at most aesthetically engaging. Rare are the moments when Strickland is able to weave his jarring sonic expressionism, and its related images of creators caught up in intoxicating bliss, with his removed and static approach to laying out each of their motivations. While there’s a riveting absurdity to a handful of interactions — in particular, Glock’s pompous, often public dismantling of Stones, and Stevens’ misguided sexual advances towards the young Billy — Strickland seldom manages to make his straightforward narrative inform his more avant-garde acoustic experiments in any meaningful way beyond connecting mechanical dots.

In the process, despite the constant and overt presence of creative metaphors — questions of interpretation, and how much of themselves people pour into their work — Flux Gourmet rarely amounts to much when it isn’t luxuriating in the harsh, disconcerting, and discontinuous compositions of its experimental artists. And while it does crescendo in a delightfully disturbing manner (which literalizes one of the aforementioned metaphors by reframing the opening scenes), this can’t help but feel like too little too late into its 109-minute runtime.



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