In the Flesh: Flux Gourmet

Julie Taymor’s Titus, Tarsem Singh’s The Cell and The Fall, Lynch’s infamous Dune adaptation — I’m a longtime lover of strange costumes and odd tones, elements which can carry entire films for me. Flux Gourmet fits the bill in many respects, with its outlandish horned headpieces and monastic robes, but whatever spell it’s trying to cast with its its bizarre couture, its ritualized cooking scenes, and its cold, impersonal translations of food into soundscapes — the invented art form of “sonic catering”—, it just doesn’t manage to bring it off. The film’s lack of genuine sensual interest in food seems to be intended as a sort of jab at over-intellectualized art. Its self-professed “hack” journalist/critic character, Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), even suffers from symbolic constipation and gastrointestinal distress, literally spending the film full of shit, as it were, while narcissistic, abrasive artist in residence Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed) speaks bluntly of shocking audiences for its own sake and her lack of artistic vision.

Still, if you’re going to make a film about people you hold in contempt, it helps to have a handle on what makes them tick. Director Peter Strickland seems to lack interest in probing those inner reaches of his satirical archetypes, from Elle’s bald-faced emptiness to the managerial mediocrity of Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie, badly miscast but giving it the old college try). Everyone we meet is flat, dull, and better understood as a vehicle to deliver absurdist half-jokes about a fictional artistic field than as a true character in the usual sense. None of this is disqualifying, really — plenty of great films revolve around contemptible people behaving in unrecognizable ways — Tod Solondz’s Happiness springs to mind — but those movies are curious about human nature. They move beyond pointing out how absurd something is and probe at the reasons it occurs, the ways culture enables and perpetuates it. Flux Gourmet has no such curiosity.

Perhaps the film’s most fundamental flaw is its inadequate framing and set dressing. We watch cloaked performers in a blank space go on imaginary trips to the grocery store, their movement indifferently blocked, the spectacle not only a failure in terms of visual language but a tedious hammering home of the point that this art form is thin and tepid. Elle and her bandmates ply their trade in similarly barren surroundings, draped in shapeless tunics as they gyrate and play with synthesizers connected to bubbling pots and dishes of aspic. It’s all meant to evoke a kind of Jodorowskyian clean-lined weirdness, a realer than real aesthetic straight out of comic books, but there’s less life to it than there is to the film’s groan-inducing conclusion that the human element — the other characters eat Elle in the final dish served — is what’s missing from their empty artistry. Flux Gourmet tries a great deal, which I have to respect, but there’s nothing on this menu that I’d order twice.