British writer-director Peter Strickland, the distinctive film-maker behind such deliciously indefinable mysteries as Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy, says he hopes his latest cinematic chef-d’oeuvre “treats stomach problems responsibly while still pushing the boundaries of taste”. It’s a typically straight-faced statement from a wry artist whose habitually ritualised, fetishistic films have consistently straddled the boundary between the satirical and the serious, the playful and the profound. If Strickland’s last feature, In Fabric (2019), was an episode of Are You Being Served? as reimagined by David Lynch, then this “gastrointestinal drama” feels like an episode of The Galloping Gourmet being watched by a drunken doctor while performing a colonoscopy. It’s a bizarre exercise in culinary theatre, in which trapped wind becomes a source of tragicomic pain and a book of “lovely recipes and fun tips to preserve your man’s love” provokes anti-patriarchal hilarity.
Strickland regular and spectacular screen presence Fatma Mohamed is typically imperious as Elle di Elle, frontwoman of a culinary performance collective (“every collective needs a leader”) comprising goth-haired Billy Rubin (Asa Butterfield) and food-secretive Lamina Propria (Ariane Labed). Propitiously, they have landed a residency at the Sonic Catering Institute, a temple of culinary and alimentary performance led by the kohl-eyed, ruby-lipped Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie). Here, they will workshop their latest project, observed by an audience who will join them in orgiastic aftershow appreciation (“such flamboyant intimacy”), all duly documented by the institute’s docile “dossierge”, Stones (Makis Papadimitriou).
