An epic quest for Noodle Nirvana, as a Tokyo widow tries to make a go of her husband's ramen restaurant. Her gastronomical guide in this endeavor is a square-jawed trucker who wears an American cowboy hat pulled down to his eyebrows and has affixed a pair of cattle horns atop the cab of his truck: not for nothing has this movie been promoted as "The First Japanese Noodle Western." Thus when our hero first enters the noodle shop on a portentously stormy night and all heads swivel to inspect him, it's the archetypal Stranger In Town coming through the swinging saloon doors. That sort of thing, together with the training sequences (fifteen seconds on the stopwatch will need to be shaved off the serving-time) and the recruitment of a band of culinary experts reminiscent of The Seven Samurai (or, just as good, The Magnificent Seven) and the final riding-off on separate trails into the sunset, plus bits of classical music to help elevate the tone (Mahler, was it?), will place the movie dead-center in the sparsely populated category of the mock-heroic. The "mock" element in the equation makes excellent sport of all that solemn business of sensei, or "master," in the Japanese tradition; and it makes further sport, somewhat more universally, of the place of priority that food has come to occupy in some people's lives. (Interspread with the central storyline are numerous asides or sidebars in which our principal characters play no part, and moreover have no connection to the "characters" who do play a part -- a device that might prove confusing to viewers who prefer to stick to the freeways of fiction and never want to try an unfamiliar off-ramp; really it makes for a not very radical experiment whereby the narrative is organized around an overriding theme -- that of oral gratification -- rather than around a fixed set of characters.) Like all the better burlesques dating back to The Rape of the Lock or so, Tampopo, however, cuts two ways. For all the bewildering obsessiveness of the quest for the ideal noodle (latest installment in the infinite Zen and the Art of... series), there is something serious being said about the existential mission of following out one's own destiny as well as about the nobility attainable in the performance of the humblest task. And the final attainment in this case pushes irony aside and tips the balance for once toward the "heroic." With Nobuko Miyamoto and Tsutomu Yamazaki; written and directed by Juzo Itami. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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