Bushi no Kondate
Here begins my Singapore days which, film-wise, of course start with films on airplanes. My first instinct was to choose a movie I’ve been really wanting to see. In fact, I typically find at least 6-7 films on a given flight which I would want to see, but various reasons keep me up from watching the films. For example, on one flight I wanted to see “North by Northwest” but then realized that I had trouble understanding a single word due to the bad audio quality and lack of subtitles. This time, I started watching the first few seconds of “La grande bellezza” but quickly got frustrated with the terrible visuals. I could tell that this was a film to enjoyed in HD and I decided to keep it for later. In fact, the best strategy to tackle flight movies is probably to choose films that are enjoyable but not too important or meaningful. So here we are with “Bushi no Kondate”, a Japanese food comedy. It was one of those food films presented at the Berlinale this year where you could get a dinner and a movie for something like 70 euros? It was ridiculous.
Well, the film does justice to the food. Its presentation always makes it look and sound incredibly delicious, and strongly made me crave traditional Japanese food. If I was given unlimited funds to go to a single restaurant, I would want to go to a kaiseki restaurant. The food we see in this film is pretty much just that (from what I can tell), so it was easy to get into.
Story-wise, “Bushi no Kondate” was pretty forgettable. Demure, cute woman becomes wife of some a kitchen samurai who must learn to cook – yawn. This movie is a typical example of the usual terribly scripted, terribly acted, bland Japanese film that makes you wonder how anyone in the country manages to produce gems like “Departures” and “Like father, like son”.
It felt good to cross one movie off the list of Berlinale films I wanted to see, but if I had known beforehand I would probably have skipped on this film despite my enjoyment of the food porn.