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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region Focus International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters
A dishful of images
By Mohamed El-AssyoutiFood: this most basic need entails a variety of habits and attitudes in diverse places on our planet. These often imply an intricate pattern of social characteristics specific to each community. For instance, Abdel-Wahab Elmessiri expresses his concern about loss of particularity -- with individuals becoming more and more superficially similar in a continuously diminishing world -- by comparing burgers to stuffed vine-leaves (mahshi). In terms of modes of production and consumption of these two very different meals, there is a huge disparity regarding the care, energy, skill and time invested in each case. Not surprisingly it is only the very "little differences" that strike Vincent Vega (John Travolta) when he goes to McDonald's in France: it is not Big Mac, but Le Big Mac, not Quarter Pounder -- because "they have the metric system" -- but Royale with Cheese. It is no coincidence that the cool fast-paced verbal witticism of Quentin Tarantino's films should gain such popularity: explicit in the setting and dialogue of Pulp Fiction (1994) and in the general style of all his other films, there is conscious catering for the millions around the globe whose daily meals come out from under the golden arches.
Exploring the mutual relation between food and sensuality is a recurrent theme in many films. Fast food is predictably abrupt and insignificant, while Far Eastern and Latin American are more elaborate and detailed. Two Far Eastern films humourously treat the cooking trade. Juzo Itami's Tampopo (1987) divides his comic homage to Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) and Spaghetti Westerns, among others, according to several culinary themes -- for instance, food's relation to healthy sexual and spiritual life. Tampopo depicts a humble widow's success in her restaurant business when she discovers the secret of perfect noodles with the help of a Shane-like loner. From lessons in Zen to culinary trivia, Itami does not forgo a plunge into Japanese eroticism: a man orders a crustacean served on the belly of his charming belle.
Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) by Ang Lee is about a Taiwanese family whose members gather every Sunday for dinner, the parallelism between food and sex (love relationships) being explicit in the very title. The love lives of each of three daughters and the widowed father are undergoing serious changes. The father, the best cook in the country, is sometimes called by the extravagant hotel where he used to work to go and save the day. Entering the huge kitchen like a surgeon the operating theatre, he proceeds to perform miracles and rescue the important feast the hotel is offering from utter failure. Geese, fish, pasta, salads... the first 10 minutes of this film, during which the father prepares the family's Sunday meals, are enough to make anyone suffering from lack of appetite drool.
Another theme, less important in Itami and Lee's films, is the relation between food, spirituality and death, and the political and existential questions it poses. The Mexican Como Agua para Chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, 1992), Alfonso Arau's remarkable interpretation of Laura Esquivel's superb novel, conjures up a colourful and fantastic magic realism against the historical backdrop of the Mexican revolution. The story of Tita, the younger sister who is condemned by tradition to lead a celibate life in order to serve her mother, Elena, and thus suffers her lover Pedro marrying to Rosaura, her elder sister, is simply a variation on Cinderella. However, the originality of this narrative both in its novel and film forms is derived from the fact that it is structured like a cooking manual. Tita's diary entries are introduced through a recipe preceding the narration of the event, which is usually depicted as a consequence of the recipe's effect on the characters. While Elena slices onions, Tita's tears, like a spring inside Elena's womb, push her into the world. Her tears in the batter of Rosaura's wedding cake transmit to all the guests a strange "melancholic yearning for the love of their lives," the intoxication climaxing in a collective vomiting spree. Quails with rose-petal sauce communicate her sensual relation with Pedro to all her family; her sister Gertrudis is so affected she seeks work in a brothel. Rosaura's declaration that her own infant daughter will follow the same family tradition as Tita drives the latter to wish that the words would go back into Rosaura's stomach "until they rot inside and worms eat them up." This curse upon a dish is fulfilled; Rosaura suffers flatulence, bad breath, gases and obesity which eventually lead to her death. Chilies with pomegranate and special sauce tempt guests to pursue long-lost loves and unfulfilled erotic desires. Finally, eating matches ignites the ecstasy of the lovers' reunion, and Tita and Pedro explode, quite literally, in flames. Tita's diary-cook book survives the blazing fire, though, so her grand-niece can tell us the tale.
photo: Thierry Gicquel
The idea of revelation through food also informs the Danish Oscar-winning Babattes Gaestebud (Babette's Feast, 1987), based on Isaac Denisen's short story. In the 1870s, two elderly sisters supervising a religious community on Denmark's windswept Jutland coast assign their Parisian cook to prepare a feast. The villagers' asceticism contrasts subtly with the gastronomic brilliance of the feast in the background, and several hidden secrets are brought to light under the influence of the food.
As for Egyptian cinema, two films are noteworthy. After the exquisite cinematic feast he offered us in Al-Madina (The City, 1999), eating and sensuality is the theme of Youssri Nasrallah's next film, titled Al-Maa Wal-Khudra Wal-Wagh Al-Hassan (Water, Greenery and a Beautiful Face). Our other culinary piece of cinema is Mohamed Khan's Kharag Wa Lam Ya'ud (Missing Person, 1984) which Assem Tawfiq scripted. This humourous critique of dehumanisation in big-city life depicts a depressed urban dweller who leaves for the countryside, where he tries to sell a piece of land he had inherited. He is charmed by the idyllic life, but has to keep up with the voracious appetites of his hosts, who literally never stop eating, even waking up to snack. He soon adapts to their eating habits, but only after he is taken to the hospital, suffering severe indigestion due to his hosts' generosity.
It is to punish such overindulgence, in contrast, that serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) forces his victim to eat himself to death in David Fincher's postmodern film noir Seven (1995). Gluttony, which Dante places in the third circle of his Inferno, is the first of the seven deadly sins the film presents. The detectives' discovery of the giant corpse is a hellish vision that condemns the consumerist culture that Fincher so successfully showcases when directing advertisements.
An indulgent feast features in Federico Fellini's Satyricon (1969), based on Petronius's criticism of Roman decadence in Nero's time. Trimalchio is an extravagant nouveau riche surrounded by sycophants from diverse walks of life. Whole roast animals and giant sausages are served and many a slave is engaged in preparing the various meals.
Besides Fincher's and Fellini's, there are more grim utilisations of eating. Pier Paolo Pasolini's coarse satire of bourgeois sado-masochist surrender to the tyranny of the system takes its most graphic form in his last film. Based on the Marquis de Sade's Les Cent-vingt Journées de Sodome and set in Fascist Italy, Salo: Le 120 Giornate di Sodoma (Salo: 120 Days of Sodom, 1975) depicts the torture a Fascist elite inflicts on a group of youngsters they kidnap and imprison in an isolated castle.
Peter Greenaway's visually simplest but dramatically most pregnant film opens with the same meal as Sal˜'s. In a twist on an Ancient Greek legend comes the superbly filmed finale of Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989). Georgina, the adulterous wife forces Spica, her roguish husband, to eat her lover (whom he had killed).
What would you do if you could only eat one thing? Cannibalism has existential connotations in Frank Marshall's mediocre Alive (1993). Based on a true incident, Alive tells of a rugby team's 1972 plane crash in the high Andes. On the eighth day, hearing on the radio that they have been given up for dead, they have to choose between eating the corpses of their frozen teammates or joining them.
Eating can be a pleasurable act or a burdensome duty -- cinema has understood this duality, and taken it to every possible extreme. Virginia Woolf puts it in a nutshell: "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
