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Tampopo (タンポポ or 蒲公英) is a
1987
Japanese
comedy film by
director
Itami Juzo, starring
Yamazaki Tsutomu,
Miyamoto Nobuko and
Watanabe Ken. The publicity for the film calls it "the first 'noodle
western,'" a play on the "Spaghetti
Westerns"--Western films made in Italy.
Plot Summary
Tampopo begins when two truck drivers, one young and one
experienced, happen onto a decrepit roadside fast food stop selling
ramen. The business is not doing too well, and after getting involved
in a fight, the heroes decide to help the young lady owner Tampopo to turn
her establishment into a paragon of the "art of noodle soup making".
The main narrative is interspersed with
food porn on several levels. The primary B story involves a
white-suited
yakuza (Yakusho
Koji) and his mistress (Kuroda
Fukumi) who check into a hotel and do things with crawfish that, well,
you'd just have to see. Other sideplots include an office intern who shows
up his senior colleagues by ordering well at a French restaurant, a
housewife who rises from her deathbed to cook one last meal for her
family, and a women's class who learn to eat spaghetti the gaijin
way.
The camerawork and filmic techniques are sophisticated for the time,
story strands transitioning on the fly, some of the characters of the
subsidiary storylines addressing the audience directly or hamming it up
deliberately.
The main storyline has been compared by some to that of the
Western movie
Shane.
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