You Love to See It: Tampopo

A young man reaches around his lover, cracks an egg on the edge of a bowl, and deposits the yolk in his mouth. He holds it on his tongue as he passes it to her with a kiss, the golden membrane slithering over the irregular surfaces of their teeth and tongues, conforming to the shifting flesh and jostling bone of their intimacy. For an almost unbearably tender minute they twist their bodies to exchange the glistening yolk until, inevitably, its membrane ruptures and it spills down the woman’s chin in a dark yellow dribble as she sways in ecstasy. Tampopo, Juzo Itami’s 1985 erotic action comedy about humanity’s complex relationship to food, explores the inherent eroticism of food and eating with unrivaled depth, but nowhere more poignantly than in its depiction of the lovers and the egg.

The tension of the scene is expertly layered. A raw egg is food, but dirty, potentially dangerous even, and the threat of its imminent dissolution mimics the buildup to an orgasm just as its trickling from the woman’s mouth mimics cum oozing over skin. Our knowledge of the egg’s membrane’s fragility instills the scene with a sense of imminent crisis, a kind of transgressive intimacy in which something unclean is passed back and forth between the pair with incredible gentleness to prolong the pleasure of its undoing. The sordid nature of the act is indispensable to the scene’s meaning, tying it to shame, degradation, and other foundational psychosexual emotions. It’s also an act of wasteful consumption, a purely hedonistic undertaking.

Actors Kōji Yakusho and Fukumi Kuroda are electrifying, their breath rasping and tense, their bodies twisting artfully as he stoops to receive the egg from her or she tilts her head back to take it from him. When it breaks, she shivers, then lolls in his arms while she drools the broken yolk down the front of her dress. By running right up to the edge of ridiculousness and trusting his actors to imbue a strange situation with relatable emotion, Itami finds something truly divine in its bizarrity. The egg survives for only a couple minutes, but that’s love. That’s sex. Absurd, delicate, and exquisitely finite.