Flux Gourmet: A Burnt Offering

Plot via IMDB:

Set at an institute devoted to culinary and alimentary performance, a collective finds themselves embroiled in power struggles, artistic vendettas, and gastrointestinal disorders.

I know my wife loves to cook and I know she likes hearing the sounds of all that food prep: the chopping, dicing, oiling, boiling and sometimes the toiling. She worked for a while as a chef and has a culinary school background. There is a movie, or at least good sound poem there, perhaps maybe in the noise of the stomach and bowels digesting and excreting it. Yet, she would never consider herself a “sonic caterer”, a performance artist creating food music for the music’s sake. Food is meant to be eaten and not heard.

In Flux Gourmet, the director, Peter Strickland, gives the audience all that in the first thirty minutes. That’s the amount of time needed to find the art and music, and the comedy in food. It’s also, about the time it takes to make one good meal. Art and comedy when it gets overcooked gets dry, burnt or mushy. Flux Gourmet is definitely a burnt offering.

Strickland’s 2013 Berberian Sound Studio, a twisted horror remake of sorts of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, established Strickland’s noisy obsession. Strickland took all that white noise and spun it into a gem of a film that managed to define the static of listening to both internal and external universes unraveling. It was like hearing the Big Bang explode and than implode into a whimper. In Flux Gourmet the food white noise is just a pretense to explore artistic obsession, pretension and rivalry. But it’s not good art that is being cooked and served. Just bad art, from a boring limited mind, delivering cliches and shock palettes when the usual doesn’t work.

The folks here, minor character actors from Game of Thrones and Netflix’s Sex Education, are being treated as Rock stars. (They can’t even agree on a name for this performance troop.) Their talent and art doesn’t rise above the good Cover Band level. Yet, it gets just as much applause from the internal audience watching, at some point in Flux Gourmet, this literal shit show. It even shows a performance piece that is an abbreviated colonoscopy exam.

It’s suppose to be satire but is just bad shock theater. I fast forwarded through the worthless, unfunny art parts to get through the ordinary human tedium even faster.

A.O. Scott, The New York Times movie critic, described Flux Gourmet as “It’s like a Restoration comedy run through a John Waters filter and sprinkled with Luis Buñuel itching powder.” That synthesis produces either genius or nonsense. For me it was more the second. For my wife, the cook, it was a burnt meal not worth eating.