Tampopo is not a 'spaghetti western' but rather a 'noodle western', har har. My husband and I bonded over this movie early in our relationship when he was still pretending to have some sort of taste in film. It's a brilliantly weird set of vignettes about food - most humorous, some sexy - all unified around the story of a widow (named Tampopo, or dandelion) who, with the help of a few Japanese cowboy-truckers, is attempting to perfect the art of noodle selling.
Incidentally, my friend Tor once described a scene from this movie as 'the sexiest scene in all of cinema'. You really must watch it to understand, but suffice it to say that he licks lemon juice and salt off her erect nipples and that they pass an egg yolk from mouth to mouth until it breaks and dribbles down her chin. Later on the same fellow eats a raw oyster out of the hand of a nubile teenager.
Now, I'm a vegetarian(ish?), but this movie provides shot after loving shot of steaming pork ramen. The heroine spends months in her samurai-like quest, and, in the end, boils up worshipful noodles and soup, topped with slices of fatty, gleaming pork. After seeing it again, and after reading a strangely timed NYT article (http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/travel/31ramen.html) about Toyko's ramen shops, I was filled with a sort of mad need to eat Tampopo Ramen myself, or the closest thing I could find.
My husband and I (shall we call him Prometheus? No, that's stupid, let's just call him Siegfried.) Siggy and I found a shop called 'Shin Sen Gumi' where we waited for about an hour in an unusual southern California drizzle to order bowls of ramen. They arrived - a thick meaty broth floating with little blobs of fat, piles of thin sliced pork and shaved scallions on top. I broke apart my chopsticks, inhaled the heady scent, and took that first bite...
There is something so sad about that moment where fantasy meets reality. I've done this so many times. The soup in my head wasn't soup anymore, it had become something like the Platonic ideal of 'soup'. The soup by which we measure all other soup. The soup that exists in a realm we may never touch or see. The soup we knew before we came into the world, and will some day be reunited with again. And, of course, the real thing was good but in the end just soup.
The next day I spent the morning reading with the cats. Well, I read, they napped on me or forcefully kneaded my poor stomach as they liked. As lunchtime rolled around, I realized I wanted more ramen. So Siggy and I headed down to another place called 'Santouka' and waited another hour, this time in a crowded asian market, for more real-life soup.
Which was actually remarkably tasty.
Great with the "fantasy meets reality!"
ReplyDeleteThe way you eat (soup) was also important to the experience. There was a moment of reverence before splashing in... like a good prayer of thanks... a sacred ritual of touching the meat with the chopstick, pushing it under, saving it... an anticipation which heightens the taste? or the disappointment?
On another track, I have also used scenes from the movie as a metaphor for Japan's rise to world leadership in Quality: a sensei, dedication, training, discipline, improvement, teamwork, etc. It's all there.