Tampopo Movie

Tampopo
Rating:
Run Time: 114 min
MPAA Rating: NR
Released: 1986
Directors: Juzo Itami
Genre/Type: Comedy
Satire
Comedy of Manners
Producers: Seigo Hosogoe
Juzo Itami
Yasushi Tamaoki
Plot Synopsis by Matthew Tobey
The sophomore directorial effort from ill-fated Japanese filmmaker Juzo Itami, Tampopo is an off-beat comedy featuring several intersecting stories all related to food. Tsutomu Yamazaki plays Goro, a truck driver who helps a young widow named Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) improve her noodle restaurant. Over the course of the film, the story drifts around, not only following the stories of Tampopo, her son, and Goro, but also a number of customers who come through the diner, including an old woman (Izumi Hara) who insists on squeezing the cheese at a market and a criminal (Ken Watanabe) with a food-based kink. Tampopo was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 1988 Independent Spirit Awards.

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: This article is about the film of this title. For the J-pop group, see Tanpopo. Tampopo (タンポポ literally "dandelion") is a 1985 Japanese comedy film by director Juzo Itami, starring Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto and Ken Watan...
Went over to Aya and Tmonkey's place last night for cocktails on their astroturf rooftop and delicous grapefruit fennel steak salad. We were lying like comatose whales on the living room floor flipping through the iTV when we unanimously ...
One of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, Tampopo. I wish I knew the exact dimensions of that carbon steel frying pan the man is using. I hesitated getting one at Kappabashi the last time because the extreme nerd in me wante...

Cast

Actors Character Born
Ken Watanabe Gun Oct 21, 1959 in Niigata, Japan
Nobuko Miyamoto Tampopo Mar 27, 1945 in Aichi, Japan
Tsutomu Yamazaki Goro
Koji Yakusho Man in White Suit
Rikiya Yasuoka Pisken
Kinzo Sakura
Akira Kubo Restaurant Owner
Shuji Otake Rich Old Man
Choei Takahashi Company's Staff
Masahiko Tsugawa Supermarket's Manager

Back to the topReview

Review by Jonathan Crow
A gleeful thumb in the eye of Japan's money-mad 1980s culture, Juzo Itami's masterpiece subverts all that is right and proper with food and sex. Dubbed the first "noodle western," the film concerns a craggy-faced Shane-like stranger (he drives a semi instead of a horse) who aids a young widow named Tampopo as she struggles to make the best bowl of ramen noodles in town. On one level, the film works as an odd metaphor for Japan's newfound affluence, built on avid borrowings from other cultures. Each of the figures who gathers around to help Tampopo has a distinct national signifier: the belligerent, often drunk Piskin (not a common Japanese name) evokes Russia, the itinerant Noodle Master who sports a beret and speaks wistfully about French cuisine indicates France, and, of course, the cowboy hat-sporting Goro recalls the United States. Yet the film's loose structure, organized around seemingly unrelated vignettes, gives it a wider cultural resonance. From the scene in which the Man in the White Suit and his moll perform an unnatural act with raw egg to the corporate neophyte who upstages his boss with his expert knowledge of gourmet cuisine to the old woman who molests fruit in a grocery store, everyone in Tampopo is obsessed with food and uses it to stage their own quiet, often perverse protests against Japan's rigid hierarchical society. Like films from the French New Wave, Tampopo is a dizzying, kaleidoscopic inside joke. Itami includes references from the aforementioned Shane (1953) to Breathless (1960) to the later works of Luis Buñuel and Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (1971) (complete with a soundtrack drawn from Gustav Mahler's First and Third Symphonies). Tampopo is a wildly inventive, fantastically entertaining movie by a film master at the peak of his powers.
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