Peter Strickland is cinema’s elegant poet of fetish and rapture and oddity, creating movies that are like double-gatefold electro-pop concept albums full of deadpan not-exactly-comedy and strange mitteleuropaïsch pastiche. After his relatively conventional debut in 2009, the psychological drama Katalin Varga, Strickland moved into horror and eroticism – or, at any rate, into a world stylistically adjacent to scary or sexy, with his quasi-giallo homages: Berberian Sound Studio in 2012, with Toby Jones as the tormented sound engineer; The Duke of Burgundy in 2014, about BDSM; and In Fabric in 2018, about a haunted red dress. Now he has gone even further out on his slender limb with this pedantically bizarre creation – in which Peter Greenaway’s influence is making itself felt – occupying a precarious position in its own created world. Flux Gourmet is sometimes funny and always exotic, and every moment has his distinctive authorial signature. But I am starting to wonder if his style is becoming a hipster mannerism with less substance, and a less live-ammo sense of actual danger.
The setting is an English country house, which is a centre for research into “sonic cooking”. It hosts a regular prestigious residency for an up-and-coming auditory-cuisine collective: that is, a group of creative people who are into cooking as an experimental live event, combined with live Radiophonic Workshop-type sound creations, with – as it were – microphones shoved into butter and theremins set up near the consommé. Over a few days, the group is invited to workshop its food-sound ideas, discussing things with the centre’s various advisers, climaxing in a big showpiece event on the final night.
