Tampopo
Tampopo (タンポポ or 蒲公英) is a 1985 Japanese comedy film by director Itami Juzo, starring Yamazaki Tsutomu, Miyamoto Nobuko and Watanabe Ken. The publicity for the film calls it "the first 'noodle western,'" a play on the "Spaghetti Westerns"--Western films made in Italy.
Plot Summary
Tampopo begins when two truck drivers, one young and one experienced, happen onto a decrepit roadside fast food stop selling ramen. The business is not doing too well, and after getting involved in a fight, the heroes decide to help the young lady owner Tampopo to turn her establishment into a paragon of the "art of noodle soup making".
The main narrative is interspersed with food porn on several levels. The primary B story involves a white-suited yakuza (Yakusho Koji) and his mistress (Kuroda Fukumi) who check into a hotel and do things with crawfish that, well, you'd just have to see. Other sideplots include an office intern who shows up his senior colleagues by ordering well at a French restaurant, a housewife who rises from her deathbed to cook one last meal for her family, and a women's class who learn to eat spaghetti the gaijin way.
The camerawork and filmic techniques are sophisticated for the time, story strands transitioning on the fly, some of the characters of the subsidiary storylines addressing the audience directly or hamming it up deliberately.
The main storyline has been compared by some to that of the Western movie Shane.
See also: Iron Chef, noodles
