Tampopo [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

Director: Juzo Itami Juzo Itami

Overview

"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."

Product Details

Release Date:	04/25/2017
UPC:	0715515195911
Original Release:	1985
Rating:	NR
Source:	Criterion Collection
Region Code:	A
Language:	English
Time:	1:54:00
Sales rank:	9,208

Special Features

New 4k digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack; The Making of "Tampopo," a ninety-minute documentary from 1986, narrated by Director Juzo Itami; New interview with actor Nobuko Miyamoto; New interview with food stylist Seiko Ogawa; New interviews with ramen scholar Hiroshi Oosaki and chefs Sam White, Rayneil De Guzman, Jerry Jakisch, and Ivan Orkin; Rubber Band Pistol, Itami's 1962 debut short film; New video essay by filmmakers Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos on the film's themes of self-emprovement and mastery of a craft; Trailer; New English Subtitle Translation; Plus: An essay by food and culture writer Willy Blackmore

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Nobuko Miyamoto	Tampopo
Tsutomu Yamazaki	Goro
Koji Yakusho	Man in White Suit
Ken Watanabe	Gun
Rikiya Yasuoka	Pisken
Kinzoh Sakura	Actor
Shuji Otaki	Actor
Akira Kubo	Restaurant Owner
Shuji Otake	Rich Old Man
Choei Takahashi	Company's Staff
Masahiko Tsugawa	Supermarket's Manager
Kunihiko Murai	Composer

Technical Credits

Juzo Itami

Seigo Hosogoe	Producer
Juzo Itami	Director,Producer,Screenwriter
Yasushi Tamaoki	Producer

Editorial Reviews

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.