Review: FLUX GOURMET

A performance troupe takes up residence at an institute dedicated to blending art performance and food. The trio are led by a spiky woman who keeps her two collaborators under a cult-like control. The Institute's boss is concerned about the act's direction into potentially dodgy territory with their performances as a prankster group whose application for residency failed is causing trouble by hurling freshly killed terrapins through the windows. Through all this, the writer charged with recording the residence is having severe digestive problems which the house doctor, flown in from an 18th century novel, given his sadistic bedside manner and classical snobbery, treats him for less like a doctor than a research scientist.

This is Peter Strickland's return to a more focussed narrative since The Duke of Burgundy and he has chosen archness over compassion. We get a series of repeated situations which differ by character involvement and events but the construction is set and becomes dependable, perhaps in place of empathetic. Strickland's typical pointed dialogue swings from the awkward to the satirical which offers plenty of rarefied comedy to fill the void created by the formality. But then the performances themselves and the performance workshops veer between ridiculous and genuinely compelling. Scenes of woo and sex are given a kind of Regency coquettishness but the juxtaposition between that and the contemporary setting creates an unexpected tension. Yet, none of this feels like experimental cinema in the slightest.

This is because the film plays fair with its setting and the demi-monde of the performance art cosmos. Everyone has a comedy name like Elle Di Elle or Stones which relates to digestion or the art world but the performances of an expertly cast line up lift what might well have looked like a self consuming satire into a comedy that plays by the rules of the milieu it ridicules. Strickland stalwart Fatima Mohammed breathes real life into Elle Di Elle who might well have stiffed into caricature. A scene where she is smearing faeces on her face has you assuring yourself that it's just prop Nutella before you realise that the cringe is necessary for the enjoyment of the scene which is all in performance. Gwendoline Christie is imposing as Institute head Jan Stevens and Asa Butterfield gives a kind of male Courtney Barnett in Billy Rubin, all swallowed shyness and constant discomfort behind a heavily directed fringe.

If I've given the impression that this is a stuffy piece with jokes that only an art groupie is likely to get be assured that, while most of it is directed at the art world you won't be needing a reading list to join the giggles (and there are some big laughs). If you've got used to Strickland's hauntological films like In Fabric or Berberian Sound Studio be aware that this one only does that with the score (which is quite wonderful). Flux Gourmet is much more like recently emerging British film makers like Joanna Hogg who thrive on cold observation for warmer ends. You might discern a lineage from the rich tableaux-bound films of Peter Greenaway but, as genuinely comedic as those could be, if they've learned from him they've also learned to laugh a little harder and more warmly.