Mark Reviews Movies: FLUX GOURMET

Flux Gourmet, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 23, 2022

The story of writer/director Peter Strickland's Flux Gourmet revolves around an insulated community of artists, living in residency at an institute that gives them the means, the opportunity, and the audience to create and perform their work. Their art is a strange combination of food and sound—a kind of "sonic catering," as the name of the institute provides a fine enough description of the goal.

Strickland is no stranger to the odd behaviors of eccentric characters, but even he seems at a bit of a loss as to how to bring these unique actions and these particular figures together in a way that extends beyond their inherent strangeness. It's a movie about insular thinking that becomes too insular in its own way of thinking.

As a study of big and egotistical personalities, there's definitely some humor and intrigue to be found here, at least. The head of the institute is Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), who comes across as exceedingly polite, gracious, accommodating, and all of those other adjectives one might expect of a dedicated patron of the arts. There's more to her beneath the perfectly outfitted and gregarious exterior, of course, since she is also a bit demanding and controlling, albeit with a smile at first, just as one might also expected of an artistic patron with a lot to lose on the failure of her investments.

This season's residency has been granted to a trio of artists who work vegetarian and with a focus on shock value. The self-proclaimed leader of this so-called "collective"—the first and definitely not the last sign of the contradictory and hypocritical nature of so many of the characters here—is Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed), who's as demanding as Jan pretends not to be.

Her partners are Billy Rubin (Asa Butterfield) and Lamina Propria (Ariane Labed), who plan and orchestrate the technical side of a performance. Essentially, Elle is the one who comes up with the ideas, a way of thinking that Billy and Lamina lament they don't possess, and her bandmates ensure that the microphones, mixers, and other sound equipment that captures and manipulates the noises of the preparation and cooking of food are in order. As of now, their relationships are professional, but Elle had been romantically and/or sexually involved with Billy and Lamina at one point. The tensions keep rising among the band, but there's a sense that each of them would be lost in some way or another without the others.

All of this is merely setup for a story that gradually reveals more about these characters, their histories—which might be true, partially honest, or distractions—and past relationships, their current entanglements, and the very odd performances the troupe puts on for an audience so appreciative that there's a traditional orgy backstage after nearly every show. That's the surface of this study of clashing egos and motives. Just to make sure we're not tempted to take any of it seriously, Strickland provides us with a dull but, in one way at least, peculiar narrator for the tale.

He's Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), a "hack"—his word—of a writer who dreams of having his own ideas published one day. As of now, he can only get work writing manuals or in his current gig: serving as the institute's in-house reporter. That's the dull part.

The peculiar aspect of Stones is that, with his ambitions and sense of failure in place, his entire character revolves around a bad case of persistent indigestion he has developed. While the artists create and bicker among themselves and come at odds with Jan's "suggestions," poor Stones spends most of his time trying to hold in farts, sitting on the toilet, and offering daily musings on his levels of bloating and the extent of his fear of embarrassing himself around the artists.

There's a joke here, to be sure—something about the art being made existing on one end of the digestive system, while Stones' malady has to do with the other. Like so many of Strickland's underlying ideas, though, we're left to infer most of the gag and the point. So much of this material focuses on the various oddities, the growing and blatant insincerity of the characters, and those quiet tensions becoming open conflict.

Maybe it is as simple as the notion of all art as something to be consumed and ultimately, well, expelled out the other end, and Elle's apparent performance with Stones' stool sample for the arrogant Dr. Glock (Richard Bremmer) is meant to clarify that. Perhaps, though, the gross-out gag is just Strickland toying with Elle's insistence on that shock is the height of art, revealing her to be little more than a charlatan even in that regard.

Strickland surely has some better idea of his intentions. In Flux Gourmet, though, there's such a thick layer of detachment, stemming from the extreme face-value characteristics on display, that there's little means or opportunity to dig beneath the movie's absurd surface.

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