Flux Gourmet – first-look review | Little White Lies

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Flux Gourmet – first-look review

13 Feb 2022

Words by Hannah Strong

Two people, a woman in a white dress and a man in a dark jacket, sitting at a table in a greenhouse setting with plants and flowers in the background.
Two people, a woman in a white dress and a man in a dark jacket, sitting at a table in a greenhouse setting with plants and flowers in the background.
Peter Strick­land serves up a help­ing of culi­nary chaos in his suit­ably strange fifth fea­ture film.

At a seclud­ed manor house, an avant-garde son­ic cater­ing col­lec­tive begin a new res­i­den­cy at the behest of prim bene­fac­tor Jan Stevens (Gwen­do­line Christie). This uncon­ven­tion­al art form involves turn­ing the sounds of food and cook­ing into per­for­mance via micro­phones and synthesisers.

For any­one who has seen Peter Strick­land​‘s 2012 fea­ture Berber­ian Sound Stu­dio, it all may sound a lit­tle famil­iar. Yet after the haunt­ed dress affair of 2018’s In Fab­ric, in a way Strick­land tells a more straight­for­ward sto­ry, which nev­er­the­less is per­haps his strangest to date.

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The col­lec­tive con­sists of vision­ary Elle di Elle (Strick­land reg­u­lar Fat­ma Mohamed) and her two tech­ni­cians, Bil­ly (Asa But­ter­field) and Lam­i­na (Ari­ane Labed). Their res­i­den­cy is to be doc­u­ment­ed by jour­nal­ist Stones (Makis Papadim­itri­ou), who is – coin­ci­den­tal­ly – being treat­ed for diges­tion ail­ments by the in-house doc­tor, Dr Glock (Richard Brem­mer). Reflect­ing on the events in his nar­ra­tion, there’s a sense from the off that things aren’t going to end well for at least one of the key players.

Delv­ing into the world of egg fetish­es and scat with uncom­mon aplomb, Strickland’s trade­mark absur­dist humour is in full force in Flux Gourmet, as he always push­es the bound­aries of good taste and decen­cy. As the collective’s res­i­den­cy con­tin­ues, ten­sions between Elle and Jan Stevens flair, while a rival son­ic cater­ing group, The Man­grove Snacks, cause var­i­ous dis­rup­tions around the facility.

The plot­ting is only loose as Strick­land is more inter­est­ed in philosophis­ing about the rela­tion­ship between humans and food than he is pre­sent­ing a straight­for­ward nar­ra­tive. The din­ners fea­ture dia­tribes about gen­der roles in the kitchen and a young man’s sex­u­al awak­en­ing. There’s quite a lot to digest, and not all of it goes down easy, but it’s hard to fault Strickland’s ambi­tion and imagination.

Christie’s per­for­mance as the over­bear­ing mis­tress of cer­e­monies is par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoy­able, and the game approach of all par­ties when it comes to the more unsight­ly side of diges­tion mean the film avoids under­min­ing its own glee­ful­ly ross streak. It’s like­ly to prove divi­sive, but Strick­land has nev­er been a stranger to a spot of cin­e­mat­ic marmite.

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