On the Sonic Catering and Epicurean Toxicity of Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet

FLUX GOURMET  

(Peter Strickland, UK/US/Hungary, 2022, 111 minutes)

For his fifth feature, Flux Gourmet, filmmaker Peter Strickland (The Duke of Burgundy) had originally intended to make a "kid's film" as he told Senses of Cinema contributor John Edmond in 2019. 

The idea was to combine an adaptation of the Brothers Grimm's "The Magic Porridge Pot" with an "entertaining, funny, and strange" exploration of "current attitudes towards food allergies and autoimmune responses." 

And that's what he's done, though I'm not certain why Strickland thought kids would want to see such a thing, since it's very much an adult film, from the references to Greek philosophers to the after-performance orgies. 

The story begins and ends with a journalist or "dossierge" with gastric distress who has been documenting the residency of a collective that creates musical performances using kitchen implements. Being surrounded by the sounds and smells of cooking isn't exactly the ideal assignment for the oddly-named Stones (Suntan's Makis Papadimitriou), but he'll do whatever it takes to see the thing through.

Though the film, which was shot in England, is in English, Stones narrates in Papadimitriou's native Greek. When Strickland told Edmond, "It's actually a very personal film," that may be partly what he meant, since he's of Greek descent, though he grew up in England.

Strickland is also a member of the Sonic Catering Band, a name that will prove both significant and prescient (he includes eight of their staticky tracks on the soundtrack, along with that of other groups, including Tim Gane's Cavern of Anti-Matter, who provided the score for In Fabric). 

Fortunately for Stones, the Sonic Catering Institute (that name!), located in a Yorkshire manor house, keeps a physician on staff. In his off-hours, the dossierge meets with Dr. Glock (In Fabric's Richard Bremmer), an acerbic, tweedy gentleman, ever-present wine glass in hand, who finds Stones's acute reflux and excessive flatulence more amusing than perplexing. 

In addition to documenting their performances, Stones conducts interviews with the members of the collective: Lamina Propria (Attenberg's Ariane Labed, who also hails from Greece), Billy Rubin (Sex Education's Asa Butterfield), and Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed, a Hungarian-Romanian theater actress who has appeared in all of Strickland's films since 2009's Katalin Varga). 

In speaking with them, Stones finds that Elle, who favors Victorian-style gowns, rules the roost. Though she claims to love her bandmates, she considers Lamina and Billy eminently replaceable. Lamina, who resembles Kristen Stewart with her bleached hair and pseudo-goth wardrobe, is none too pleased when she overhears that, though she isn't the vindictive type.  

Stones and the collective sleep in the same guesthouse, where he struggles to hide his gastrointestinal troubles, a performance of a kind from a non-performer. The trio's daily routine, which he observes, involves silent morning walks through the verdant grounds and after-dinner speeches in which they reveal their thoughts about sex, food, and gender roles. 

The dossierge reports to the institute's director, Jan Stevens (Game of Thrones' Gwendoline Christie, another returning In Fabric performer), a statuesque, dramatically dressed woman with equally dramatic makeup, who has been receiving upsetting crank calls from a rejected collective, the Mangrove Snacks, whose terrapin-terrorizing members have been skulking around the grounds after hours. Her black, white, and red outfits will become increasingly baroque as institute tensions grow and accelerate. 

The color red, a Strickland favorite, factors into two of the more disturbing sequences: when Lamina ends up covered in a sticky red substance as the result of a Mangrove Snacks stunt, and when Elle performs, completely naked, while covered in a similar substance as Lamina and Billy crank out industrial noises with blenders and sequencers. In this "abattoir performance," Elle (a vegetarian) plays a pig being prepared for slaughter. 

Jan congratulates the troupe on this Dwarves-like spectacle, but suggests that they drop the flanger. Good idea or bad, Elle has no intention of taking suggestions from an outside party. Jan reminds her that she's funding the residency; at the very least, she deserves to be heard. She's not completely wrong, but nor is Elle. Both will use subterfuge to get their way.  

If you've read any interviews with Strickland, you'll know that he struggles to secure funding for his films, and that he insists on complete artistic control. His side in the debate is clear. That isn't to suggest that he isn't having fun at Elle's expense. She's a control freak and a prima donna, an implication that he shares similar qualities, though I suspect he's more genteel in his interactions with financiers. (In his interview with The Projection Booth, he admits that he had to defend the casting of Marianne Jean-Baptiste, when funders insisted she wasn't sufficiently famous to topline In Fabric).  

As the residency continues, the collective shares insights in their after-dinner speeches about their sexual pasts and proclivities, predicting the encounters to come, one of which appears to draw from Giulio Questi's kinky giallo Death Laid an Egg of which Strickland is an avowed fan (especially of Bruno Maderna's atonal score). Suffice to say: eggs are involved. 

All of these elements, from the tensions between performers to the struggle for artistic expression, converge when Stones' search for a cure becomes part of the performances. In these moments, the film swerves into gross-out comedy. Though Strickland plays with the tropes of horror--blood-like substances, masked figures skulking about the grounds--Flux Gourmet isn't as much of a horror film as Berberian Sound Studio or In Fabric, which may be why some horror aficionados have been left disappointed and confused.   

Though it's strange, even by Strickland's standards, there are precedents, including Věra Chytilová's Daisies, Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, and Wakefield Poole's Bible! (another film that Strickland has praised in interviews). 

Nonetheless, I still had to watch Flux Gourmet twice in order to wrap my head around it, something I rarely do, even though I had prepared by reading Strickland, a collection of Senses of Cinema pieces about the filmmaker, and moderated a panel about him at this year's Crypticon. 

As a viewer, I don't feel that it holds together the way that it should, but as an auteurist, I love that it's a Peter Strickland film through and through. The well-judged ending, in which the flatulence-free Stones finally becomes a sort of performance-art star, also plays just as well the second time through.

Flux Gourmet opens at SIFF Cinema on July 8, 2022. Images from Bloody Disgusting (Asa Butterfield, Fatma Mohamed, and Ariane Labed), Artists Partners (Diana Mayo, "The Magic Porridge Pot," aka "Sweet Porridge"), KeeperFacts (Gwendoline Christie and Makis Papadimitriou), Game News 24 (Christie), iHorror (Mohamed), and drfreex (The Devil in Miss Jones star Georgina Spelvin in Wakefield Poole's Bible!).