Supermarket Woman (Itami Juzo, 2006)
On DVD at home with Lucía on 25 June 2008 around 23:00.
Juzo Itami likes to make movies about self-improvement. About learning how to do something right, and about staying on the straight and narrow despite what obstacles you might find thrown at you. While much more focused than Tampopo, Supermarket Woman felt like a bit of an unwelcome refinement of his form. This not to say that I disliked the film, it’s just that where Tampopo was rough, experimental, meandering, and even educational, Supermarket Woman felt slick, formulaic, underdeveloped, and didactic. We never really came to know any of the main characters, or even really to get a good feel for them. All the background characters were mere caricatures and even the main characters were just more sophisticated caricatures.
The main story of Tampopo is not itself terribly interesting. What is interesting are the little side plots the characters get into, and even more so the little mini-stories that pull the film in this way and that. In fact, the ending of Tampopo makes me quite sad every time, because I know that the film is over and there are no more little stories to tell. Despite all of this, the entire film manages to be quite focused on a single theme: food. Aside from a short fist fight (and probably the best I’ve seen on film) and a redecorating job, the film never departs from the topic of food-making and food-eating. Supermarket Woman really suffers from being so similar to Tampopo that comparison is completely unavoidable. While a fine film in its own right (it is funny, Nobuko Miyamoto is as magnetic in her middle age as she ever was, the lessons are interesting and possibly even useful, and the dissection of the business of supermarkets is itself fascinating), it is inferior in every way to Tampopo.
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