Flux Gourmet
Peter Strickland pokes fun at performance art in this bizarre drama about artists who engage in ‘sonic catering’: recording the sound of food.
The fifth feature of Peter Strickland (BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, IN FABRIC) takes place in an art residency led by an upper-class aesthete who has invited a culinary collective to perform their ‘sonic catering’ practice for a month. Hired to report on their creative process, a Greek writer begins to suffer from indigestion to which the institution’s sarcastic doctor responds by advising him to ‘let food be his medicine’. While his intestinal disorders force him to acknowledge his own malaise, the collective is undermined by internal quarrels as well as external assaults from a group of sardonic, rejected candidates. This may all sound frivolous, but it is quite the opposite, since the film broaches not only a culinary problem but also a question about art. Films have rarely taken food intolerances and human consumption so seriously, or so literally, and certainly not to such hallucinatory and nightmarish ends. With its inimitable, precise and colourful gestures, Strickland’s gory comedy reconnects the image with those organic processes that art usually deems to be impure and unacceptable. Not as a provocation, but to remind us that the imagination should not be seen as separate from the natural realm. (source: www.berlinale.de)