Flux Gourmet (Peter Strickland, 2022) (Patreon)

It took me a minute to catch up with Strickland's latest, for a number of tedious reasons. (It never opened here, of course. IFC kept sending me screener links that didn't work. And it took two solid days to find online subtitles that included Stones' Green narration.) And although I remain steadfast in my admiration of The Duke of Burgundy, I'm beginning to think this fellow is less than meets the eye. In its barn-broad mockery of the world of High Performance, Flux Gourmet is really the Ruben Östlund / Peter Greenaway mashup we absolutely never needed.

In fact, watching Flux Gourmet, I eventually became genuinely angry. Virtually every significant idea in this film is straight out of Greenaway's oeuvre. The existential dyspepsia? Belly of an Architect. The gustatory dialectic of life and death (with a helping of excrement)? The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. The embedded violence of the performer / audience relationship? The Baby of Mâcon. But truth be told, Strickland's visual sense in this film -- symmetry, deep primary hues, characters with hair and makeup that makes them seem a bit to the side of 'human" -- is a more irritating ripoff than any given theme he's working with here. (And I'd be a bit more sanguine about Strickland's having been influenced by his British colleague, were it not for the fact that Greenaway pretty much remains in arthouse jail.)

But none of this addresses the particulars of Flux Gourmet's satire, in which the Sonic Catering Institute stands in for any institution that engulfs the avant-garde like a flytrap. This is the chronicle of a particularly unpleasant artists' residency and the backbiting that inevitably comes with such rare air. At the heart of the film are two dueling divas, neither of them particularly likeable or noble. Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamad) is the brash conceptualist who knows nothing about technique, relying for all practical matters on two "band members" named for their globular viscosity -- Lamina Propria (Ariane Labed) and Billy Rubin (Asa Butterfield). Having little to offer but attitude, Elle constantly belittles her team, feigning emotional breakdown when challenged.

Over and against Elle is the head of the Institute, Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), a passive-aggressive bureaucrat who doesn't want to diminish the artists' freedom or integrity in any way, but would like Elle and company to just consider a few constructive notes. After all, she is funding their enterprise, so hearing her out (she insists) is the least they could do. Her primary complaint is that the group's excessive use of flange distorts the culinary origin of the noise-music of the performance. Shouldn't the sound samples' real-world reference to cookery be retained?

Although Strickland plays it relatively straight, Flux Gourmet has no real interest in the clash of creativity and institutional authority, any more than Östlund did in The Square. Both men observe these matters from a glib distance, as a contest between equally odious hucksters. Inasmuch as Flux Gourmet has a moral center, it is Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), a self-admitted "hack" who has been hired by Stevens to conduct interviews with the artists and produce promotional copy. Strickland imbues him with a sense of dignified tragedy, as he is isolated from sustained human contact by chronic bowel pain and flatulence. Food is supposed to give life, but for the charlatans of the Institute, it is all mayhem and mythology. But for Stones, it seems to be killing him.

Several moments of Elle's performances are rather obviously patterned on Karen Finley, who scandalized Jesse Helms by receiving an NEA grant for smearing food on (or up) her body while delivering feminist rants. But much to Strickland's detriment, other moments of his film -- the staging of Stones' medical exams as performance, by a pseudo-cultured quack (Richard Bremmer) -- pretty directly overlap with Crimes of the Future. While Cronenberg's film is hardly without humor, it exhibits a wisdom totally missing here. He is an artist who has always considered the body as first and foremost a philosophical proposition. Strickland is clearly concerned with denaturalizing sex (Burgundy), couture (In Fabric) and now, consumption. But what does he really want to say? 

ADDENDUM: Back in high school, I collaborated with a friend of mine, Kyle Ylinen, to produce a noise performance very much like those depicted in Flux Gourmet. It was called "Fondue on Sunday," and in it, Kyle recorded his mother reading various recipes and "fondue lore" from the instruction booklet that came with her West Bend electric fondue pot. (Not the Oster pictured above.) This was mixed onto a multi-track recording layered with a lot of metallic grinding and distorted vocals. ("What kind of cheese was that? I think I'm gonna be sick!") When we performed it live, Kyle operated a food processor (in cheese-shredding mode) and I poured water from bottles into amplified wine glasses. The piece also had a visual component. Kyle photographed me eating fondue with his family as part of a narrative slide show. At the climax of the "plot," the bread fell off my skewer and stuck in the pot. Mrs. Ylinen (RIP) comforted me while I cried over my party foul. This was 1988. It was a different world back then.