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A Touch of Spice
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Within
the dreaded, unofficial genre of the food
movie, Tassos Boulmetis’ A Touch of
Spice at least has the courage of its convictions.
There
is nothing in this film that is not explained by reference to the effect of
food, spices especially. Passions, beliefs, family relations, the patterns of
history, every kind of destiny whether social or sentimental – even (in a
memorable image) the movements of the planets are yoked to this seemingly
all-powerful blandishment.
Many
films rest on cute metaphors (life is like traffic, a boxing match or the
weather report), but A Touch of Spice goes way beyond using food as a mere symbolic device. In scene after scene we
watch it being lovingly prepared and consumed; the kitchen becomes the great
laboratory wherein the world is created. The film goes so far as to adapt
Hollywood-style script structure to its own ends: intertitles do not declare
Part One or Act Two but Appetizer, Main Course, Dessert …
With
all this food fetishism in full view, it is sometimes hard for Boulmetis to get
a fix on his story line. But there is an autobiographical impulse underlying
the project: a desire to bear witness to the history of Greeks who lived in
As
a young child, Fanis (George Corraface) disturbs his parents by preferring to
work culinary marvels on his portable kitchen, even in the schoolyard, rather
than engage in typical boy behaviour. When we first see him as an adult
astronomer in
Greece,
we know that some disconnection, both internal and external, has taken place: where’s
the food?
It
seems that Fanis has turned his back not only on the wisdom of spices, but also
on the person who most profoundly imparted it to him, Grandpa Vassilis
(Ieroklis Michailidis). Also missing is the memory of his childhood sweetheart,
a Turkish girl named Saime (Renia Louizidou).
This
story contains both the trauma of history and the agony of love, but both are
approached obliquely, indirectly – not always to the film’s advantage. Partly
this is because its political aspect is shown as the young Fanis experiences
it, with only a partial, incomplete understanding. And the romantic intrigue
seems almost misplaced by the film for a long time, until Fanis at last makes
his way back to the lost traces of his past in
Istanbul.
The
bias of this story, as in so many grand, mythically-inclined tales, is
shamelessly masculine. The role of women is unfortunately clinched by a motif
that links the sight of a mother sweetening her nipple with a little sugar for
her suckling child, with Fanis’ time as a cook in a brothel, recompensed with
sexual favours. Beyond that circuit of food and sex, in which it is hard to
tell the Mothers from the Whores, there is only Saime – sublime, angelic and
seemingly unattainable.
Nonetheless,
for much of its running time A Touch of
Spice is a pleasing entertainment. An enormous box-office hit in
Greece, and the
result of the presence of Village Roadshow (originally an Australian company)
there as both exhibitor and producer, it serves up a winning blend of music (by
Evanthia Reboutsica), poignancy and humour.
Indeed,
the film’s spirit is most effectively caught in an outrageous running gag that
tracks the on-off evolution of an old woman’s Parkinson’s
Disease in terms of the new-fangled cooking gadgets with which she comes
in contact.
MORE food movies: Au petit Marguery, Mostly Martha
MORE Greek cinema: Landscape in the Mist, The Very Poor Inc., A Song is Not Enough, Oxygen ©
Adrian Martin September 2004
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