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Culinary indulgence is more aural than oral in Peter Strickland’s latest foray into fanciful fetish, which gives new meaning to ‘playing with your food’.
On a month-long residency at a prestigious art institute, an unnamed trio of ‘sonic caterers’ – artists who create music with food and related items – play with flavour, flangers and fornication under the watchful eye of their benefactor, the imperious Jan Stevens, whose meddling exacerbates the group’s backstage bickering. Outside the walls, a rival collective named the Mangrove Snacks conducts acts of gastronomic terrorism in protest at their rejection by Stevens, who doesn’t like what they do with terrapins. Documenting the proceedings is a flatulent flâneur, whose intestinal issues are not being helped by the institute’s in-house doctor.
With this sensual and sickening delight, Strickland returns to an audible/edible world he first portrayed in Berberian Sound Studio (MIFF 2012), though it’s one he has a far longer history with, having founded The Sonic Catering Band in 1996. Yes, they made music with food; yes, they reunited to create much of Flux Gourmet’s soundscape. Reuniting, also, with Gwendoline Christie (In Fabric, MIFF 2019; Game of Thrones) and long-time collaborator Fatma Mohamed (The Duke of Burgundy, MIFF 2015; Katalin Varga, MIFF 2009), the director has crafted an absurdly comic art-world satire with sprinklings of This Is Spinal Tap, the Greek ‘Weird Wave’ and Peter Greenaway, plus star Asa Butterfield (Sex Education) thrown into the mix – all meticulously cooked to filmic perfection.
“This is Strickland’s grand act of prestidigitation; he coaxes out something like poignancy from the peculiar, just as he conjures the visceral and unknowable from ordinary groceries … Chocolate mousse will never be the same.” – The Playlist
