Flux Gourmet
Directed by Peter Strickland
Running time: 1hr51 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Gwendoline Christie stars in Flux Gourmet
Peter Strickland is one the UK’s most reliably original creative minds, from his electronic music project, The Sonic Catering Band, to his stark and startling debut Katalin Varga, via aural odyssey Berberian Sound Studio and (my favourite) the supple, sensual Duke of Burgundy, through to the folkloric mischief of In Fabric, and now, Flux Gourmet. It’s quite the body of work — playful, perverse, at times fetishistic. It must have taken some willpower to secure financing for a set of films which do not necessarily speak the language of — on the one hand — UK public film funds, or — on the other — commercial investors in UK film, who tend to want something a bit more Paddington, a bit more Four Weddings, or perhaps something for the grey pound.
The role of people other than the artist in making art is one of the core concerns of Flux Gourmet, which takes place at an artists’ residency which has attracted the sort of people you would expect to find at an artists’ residency: people taking it way too seriously, people incapable of taking anything seriously enough, and every other flavour of neurotic dysfunction in between. Other running themes include flatulence, artistic collaboration, and the endlessly complex question of taste.
Our hero, to use the term loosely, is Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), a writer unenviably tasked with somehow chronicling the often lurid happenings at the residency. Stones is the physical manifestation of a gut feeling that something isn’t quite right. You can hear and feel the stomach gurglings, the perpetual bloated sensation, the air of overwhelming preoccupation with his internal rumblings, the fear of an explosion. There is a lot written at the moment about representation in film, but considering there can be very few people who have never experienced a dodgy stomach, this virtually universal experience goes relatively undocumented by contemporary chroniclers of the human condition, outside of mainstream gross-out films. I suppose that’s because nobody particularly wants to be the premier auteur of fart-house cinema, but luckily Peter Strickland seems happy to ascend to that particular throne.
While Flux Gourmet’s bodily burblings are vivid and arresting, the real meat of the piece seems to lie in its fearlessly unflattering portrait of Jan Stevens, the executive played by Gwendoline Christie. Portrayed as a paranoid egomaniac, arch manipulator and wildly vain into the bargain, this character’s attempts to impose her will while simultaneously insisting that the artist be grateful for and indeed celebrate said impositions creates an unforgettable dynamic at once comic, ludicrous and horribly plausible. I only hope it doesn’t stop such people from giving him money, but hopefully they will: after all, doing so is the best way to show that you were in on the joke all along.
FLUX GOURMET (2021) Written by Peter Strickland | Shot by Tim Sidell | Edited by Matyas Fekete
