There’s a large part of the social media experience in today’s age that centers around food, or at least, the sensations of food. Alton Brown discussed in an interview on the Youtube TV show Hot Ones about the ways that Instagram, TikTok, and other social media sites tend to warp people’s idea of what good food is into a visual and sonic sense. Many of the videos and pictures we see of food have been doctored since time immemorial (when was the first time you learned that the “stretchy cheese” in Pizza Hut commercials was actually a glue?), but it’s been exacerbated now through advanced photo and video filters as well as sound editing – food ASMR and mukbangs are still some of the most popular web content on the planet. When it comes to audial sensations, English director Peter Strickland is at the forefront of squeezing every bit of creepiness, weirdness, and comedy out of sound editing.
Not Working Together
His breakthrough film Berberian Sound Studio, which centered around a foley artist hired to do sound for a Giallo horror film, had already established a fascination with food sounds. The slicing of watermelons, the scraping of knives on a watermelon, and the tearing of lettuce, are all amplified to extremes with a backdrop of brutal torture and murder. His latest film, Flux Gourmet, sets its sights on “sonic catering”. It sounds made-up, but as Strickland says in this interview with IndieWire, it was actually something he discovered to be real and dabbled in it himself.
Flux Gourmet centers on a trio of sonic caterers, Elle (Fatma Mohamed), Lamina (Ariane Labed), and Billy (Asa Butterfield), who are in a workshop run by Jan (Gwendoline Christie) and Stones (Makis Papadimitriou). The leader of the group, Elle, is very difficult to work with and is a singular commanding artist whose arrogant persona begins to fracture the collaborative artistry of the workshop. Another major issue arising is Stones’s incessant flatulence which he seeks remedy from the strange Dr. Glock (Richard Bremmer, the film’s best and weirdest performance).
A Disconnect at the Cord
Strickland employs all sorts of musical interplay in the movie from reverberating bass to psychedelic rock, to Gothic hymns. The sounds of meat hitting hot oil, the bubbling of soup, and the smearing of various spreads are included in interludes of the sonic catering performances. Afterward, an orgy occurs where bodies and organs envelop each other in montages of color and light.
Flux Gourmet is without question a beautiful film to look at, it has contrasting bold colors that Strickland used in his previous thriller In Fabric, and it recreates some of The Duke of Burgundy’s entrancing sequences of slow zooms and shots that coalesce together with subliminal motives. But how much do these visual components and the audial bursts that accompany them amount to a fully formed movie? Not quite as well as his previous films. There is a disconnect in Flux Gourmet between image, sound, and idea.
Conclusion
Sonic catering, like any art, is dependent on the cohesion of vision and the movie tends to devote some time to the explanation of the “artist’s intent”. There are interviews that Stones conducts with all of the members of the group where they relay their backgrounds and their issues and influences in their art. These expositional statements spell out clues for the movie’s impending events, like Billy’s sexual fetish for having his nipples pinched, and the power dynamics between Elle and Lamina, but it’s awkward and frustratingly unengaging. Strickland, who portrayed sexual impulse, games, and dynamics so well in The Duke of Burgundy, makes sexuality very sterile and unenticing here. The film’s underlying bits of comedy are reduced to one-joke formats. Stones’ farting wears thin quite early on and Elle’s self-sabotaging obnoxiousness – she chews entire pieces of paper with suggestions given to her by Jan – feels empty, there’s no emotion to her actions, just pure mechanics. In all, Flux Gourmet is a movie wholly dependent on making sound editing and cinematography do all the work and they can’t quite get there.
Have you seen Flux Gourmet? What did you think? Let us know in the comments below!
Flux Gourmet was released in select theaters in the U.S. on June 24, 2022
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