PEACH, Camembert, cakes. What do these have in common?
In Juzo Itami’s 1985 movie, “Tampopo,” these are the unlikely fields of conflict between a supermarket manager and an elderly woman. She slips in just before closing time, when the place seems to be deserted.
She picks up a ripe peach, presses it several times until juice spurts, and the chase begins.
In Itami’s “ramen Western,” there are many stories, all about food: a widow is mentored by a truck driver on how to make men drain their bowls of noodles to the last drop; a gangster and his moll use the most humdrum ingredients—egg yolk, a bowl of prawns—to redefine “appetite;” a man with a toothache gives a toddler his first taste of the forbidden: an ice cream cone.
Food connects us even if our attitudes towards food differ. This divergence is brought out in my favorite vignette in “Tampopo,” the supermarket encounter.
The episode disconnects from the main narrative to meander up and down the supermarket aisles where a mysterious old lady obsessively pokes food and plays hide-and-seek with the zealous manager, as equally bent on catching the food-molesting bandit.
Almost rendered as a silent movie, the tapping of the man’s leather shoes on the supermarket floor is like a code communicating his anticipation—and ours—as he uses his wits to finally catch the old lady in the act of reaching out for the next pastry to imprint with her thumb.
When he tags that marauding hand with a fly swatter, the grin that he flashes at her is that of a young boy finally catching her, a girl, in a childhood game of “tag.” Who has not, all sweaty and grimy, had this moment of triumph among friends on an endless summer day?
Yet, it is her I see even though the camera has taken his perspective, his sympathies. True, she is the prey, our suspicions matching the pursuing manager’s that she is up to no good.
She unwraps food, bruises fruit that can never be sold. She violates the rules of the oldest agora: if you damage the goods, you must buy it. Her stealthy behavior, her flight from him confirms her own knowledge of her guilt.
Yet, for all the conventions stacked against this bizarre old lady, I find myself empathizing: when was the last time I paid attention to what I touched? When was the last time I touched consciously?
Only a small twitch betrays the face of the veteran actress Izumi Hara as she presses two round mounds of cheese that are seemingly identical; only the second releases her pleasure.
In a life dominated by news headlines and CCTV videos, only art reconnects us to the ignored and forgotten.