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Flux Gourmet ★★★
(MA 15+) 111 minutes
Talk about playing with your food. English writer and director Peter Strickland has for some years been part of an experimental band that makes music by recording the sounds of cooking.
Hamming it up: Asa Butterfield stars as Billy Rubin, Fatma Mohamed as Elle di Elle and Ariane Labed as Lamina Propria.
He jokes about the origins of the Sonic Catering Band being the result of a bout of food poisoning and a dream in which a Tory health minister was in telepathic alliance with a tapeworm sect.
That he has a wicked sense of humour is never in doubt: “The Sonic Catering Band formed, striving to perform a new working practice in electronic music whilst not having to worry about where their next meal would be coming from…”
Unless you know this, Flux Gourmet makes no sense. Even when you do know this, it makes little sense. It’s a strange piss-take on the theme of artists and their art, benefactors and their demands, and the public’s inability to distinguish shit from Shinola.
If you thought Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst had already said all that with their unmade beds and their cows in formaldehyde, think again.
Flux Gourmet is art school cool, flipped and fried, its cleverness only outdone by its desire to shock. On this last bit, filmmakers have to be careful. John Waters had Divine eat a dog turd on film 50 years ago: after that, there’s not much point unless you eat the whole dog, and this being an English film, there is none of that nonsense. Everyone has their limits.
That point is made early on. At a large country house, the Sonic Catering Institute, artists compete for residencies, which is really just a bed and a place to do some wacky recording, presided over by the marvellously overdressed patron Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie, in panda eye make-up).