TAMPOPO

The sophomore directorial effort from ill-fated Japanese filmmaker Juzo Itami, Tampopo is an off-beat comedy featuring several intersecting stories all related to food. Tsutomu Yamazaki plays Goro, a truck driver who helps a young widow named Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) improve her noodle restaurant. Over the course of the film, the story drifts around, not only following the stories of Tampopo, her son, and Goro, but also a number of customers who come through the diner, including an old woman (Izumi Hara) who insists on squeezing the cheese at a market and a criminal (Ken Watanabe) with a food-based kink. Tampopo was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 1988 Independent Spirit Awards.

“Playful and self-reflexive, Itami’s delightful shaggy-dog tale makes allusions to Samurai, American Westerns, Spielberg, but above all it’s about the power of food, specifically the art of preparing and eating noodles.”

“Tampopo” is one of the more engaging films to be shown in this year’s series. It’s also another example of the eccentric humor that has been showing up recently in Japanese films”
— Vincent Canby, The New York Times

“Director Itami has produced an engaging cinematic hybrid, brilliantly stir-frying Japanese food — and other — obsessions into cowboy themes. He calls “Tampopo” a noodle western.”
— Desson Howe, Washington Post