Tampopo

Tampopo (1985), directed by Juzo Itami, is entertaining, funny, and occasionally bizarre. Truck drivers Gorō (a cool Tsutomu Yamazaki) and Gun (a young Ken Watanabe) happen upon a rundown ramen shop, where they stop for noodles and meet Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), who hasn’t yet mastered the art of making ramen. She’s nowhere close, actually, and so tough-guy Gorō, in his cowboy hat, chivalrously sets out to show her the ropes. Along the way he falls in love with her, in a reticent sort of way, and both keep in mind he’s the wandering type and unlikely to stick around.

All the plot digressions make things more interesting. In the opening scene, the fourth wall is broken by a gangster and his companion watching a movie (us) as we watch a movie (them). He tells us he can’t stand it when people make noise in a theater and warns us not to shed any tears for him should we see him meet his own death, so we know he will. These two reappear throughout, in some outlandish sex-and-food scenes, as do various other eccentrics and deviants.

Sometimes called the “noodle western,” Tampopo has everything from street fights to heart-melting melodrama to recipe theft. It’s offbeat and captures a range of flavors or facets of Japanese humor.

Two scenes had me nearly in tears: the spaghetti-eating lesson for a group of women who can’t stop themselves from slurping their noodles, and later the scene where a group of clueless executives all order the same items from a French menu, only to be upstaged by a young subordinate who confidently selects a far more refined meal, unaware of how thoroughly he’s embarrassed his seniors.

An entertaining movie and good fun!