The
inevitable peril of films that depict or evoke the creative processes of other
art forms almost always concerns the terms of engagement; too hung up on the
methods and you have yourself a documentary, a teaching aid, or even a DIY
guide (itself perfectly benign but rarely an art). Too focused on the product,
and you either make advertisements, or run the risks of losing the art to the
artwork—a real point of contention for practitioners who do not have the
institutional benefits of death (no money no problem when you are just bones
and ashes) and need the press attention to ensure bookings and/or attendance,
and thus income.
Culinary
cinema, unlike its brethren the dance films, the musicals, and the sports
films, is thus a genre fraught with both the pitfalls of an effusive identity
as well as an unclear purview of exactly what it means to make cinema
culinarily. Films about dance and dancers may not necessarily be dance films (Aronofsky’s
Black Swan and both installments of
the Magic Mike series come to mind),
but films about food and its preparation whether as a central figure or as
character-building process are certain to be culinary cinema, even those as
distinctively disimilar as Ratatouille
and Eat Drink Man Woman. For the love
of movies, a term better and less redolent of classic elitism for this entire
topical category could just have been food films, or if one is so inclined,
movies à la munchies.
Ramen Teh, by now the seventh feature of
pioneering Singaporean filmmaker Eric Khoo, is a welcoming return to form after
two works of major contentions, the erotic anthology drama In The Room, and Cinema,
a segment in the multi-director nation-building anthology 7 Letters, Singapore’s bid for the Academy Awards in 2015, though
it remains rather a let down with no traces of the conscious artistry Khoo had
bothered to inject into his earlier works such as his debut Mee Pok Man and his sophomore 12 Storeys—both cinematic landmarks in a
landscape where there were formerly none.
Masato (Takumi Saito) is the estranged son of Kazuo (Tsuyoshi
Ihara) who once prepared kaiseki-ryōri
in Singapore during the heydays of the Nineties’ economic boom before the
financial crisis, and together they run a small ramen store with the help of
Akio (Tetsuya Bessho), Masato’s uncle who tries his best playing mediator. As
is common with the general trend for mother-less nuclear families to resent
each other onscreen, Masato is simultaneously aching for and disdainful of the
company he might find with his father, who works a lot and drinks a lot too.
Just outside of the picture is Mei Lian (Jeanette Aw), Kazuo’s dead Singaporean
wife and Masato’s mother, whose ghost still looms over her still grieving
husband, though remains not more than a warm memory for her son.
After
Kazuo dies of a sudden stroke one fine day, Masato is struck by his own abrupt
stroke of inspiration for some soul-searching, and embarks on a trip to
Singapore guided by Japanese food blogger Miki (Seiko Matsuda), based in the
sunny isle herself, to find the remainder of his extant family and learn the
truth of their disconnect.
What
follows is a serendipitous sequence of events masquerading as a plot, when it
is really ostensibly an advertorial for moneyman Singapore Tourism Board:
Masato and Miki eats their way across Singapore with Miki’s mellow verbal
recitations of standard definitions and travel guide write-ups in tow,
searching for Masato’s maternal uncle and his esteemed bak kut teh (pig bone soup) while visiting monuments captured in
photographs of his parents’ youth with an improbable geo-locating acumen for a
tourist with limited English capabilities.
Naturally,
the two bumps into Masato’s uncle Ah Wee (Mark Lee) by eating at his
restaurant, an upgrade from the dingy eatery of Mei Lian’s expositional diary
flashbacks and Masato’s own childhood impressions, and the two hit it off like
there never were decades-old gulf separating them. Indeed, it is almost magical
how Masato could comprehend the rapid-fire creole of Uncle Wee when his own responses
were stunted in comparison. One thing leads to another and before long, Masato
has moved in with the family and learnt the joys of South East Asian cooking.
Soon
enough, Masato meets Grandma (Beatrice Chien) who tosses him out the door
emotionally with all the ferocity of a World War II survivor. There were
attempts to reconcile the two nations’ tumultuous history via a television
broadcast of a very real debate concerning the titling of a Japanese Occupation
exhibition at a local museum, which supposedly moves Masato, but the feeble
script ensured that the agonizing conflict within himself on his troubled
heritage came across as petulance, as he bangs on Granny’s door at night,
drunk, angry, and verbally incontinent in Japanese. To all of Masato’s efforts,
Miki follows up with her usual chipper saccharine encouragement: “You’re just
like ramen; a mix of the best parts of Chinese and Japanese culture,” and
introduces him to Keisuke Takeda, the restaurateur who plays himself as a local
ramen don both onscreen and off it.
The
two makes peace eventually, of course, as Masato sought to redeem himself in
the eyes of the grande dame by devising a dish for her himself: the ramen teh, a portmanteau of his own ramen and his uncle’s bak kut teh, a supposed blend of the
best of both worlds. Granny eats it and cries, overtaken with guilt for
rejecting her daughter over her marriage to a Japanese devil and, presumably,
sending her to an early grave. Peace and long lost familial love restored in
one fell swoop, Granny then takes Masato grocery shopping and after that cooks
and feeds him an authentic Cantonese meal. They cry again, and after
everything, Masato moves to Singapore and opens his own restaurant dedicated to
his unique creation. Little boy lost has found himself at last; God is in his
heaven, all’s right with the world.
If
this review feels as though it might have glossed over certain portions, it
only portends the exact same that the film had done. At a runtime of only
ninety minutes, there is a certain sense of incompletion that courses through
the veins of the entire movie. In a bid to move from narrative point A to B via
the shortest route, Khoo has, perhaps unwittingly, missed out on the humanistic
story of the processes of assimilation and reconciliation that the pathos of a
film dealing with topics as heavy as grief and historical prejudice would hinge
on, and form the bulk of its honest moments.
Show
don’t tell, the oldest adage of storytelling goes, but Ramen Teh has done nothing but show—there were no tenderness to the
courtship of Mei Lian and Kazuo, displayed ad infinitum and nauseam in robotic
flashbacks via Mei Lian’s diary, just quick perfunctory affections spoken in
shoddily written lines, no lapses into private jokes nor intimate rituals between
lovers; there were no steady easing into Masato’s re-integration with his
uncle’s family, there were no awkward pauses of cultural divide and
unfamiliarity amidst the big love. One scene had Ah Wee introduce him, and by
the next, he is already as thick as thieves with his nieces. The biggest
question begged: however did a decades-old hurt be healed instantaneously with
lukewarm noodles and some ribs in a tingkat
(South Asian lunch box)? Therapists, mental health professionals, dispute
resolution specialists should have all migrated into full-time cooking as a
vocational choice en masse.
Moreover,
it remains incredulous that out of the two, the level-headed and mellow young
man should be the one to lapse into histrionics when the obstinate old lady is
the one who had suffered two losses to the same people—her husband during the
War, and her daughter to a stranger of indeterminate motivation—he had no idea
and he could still yell like a champion.
Having
shown previously at the Berlinale in the Culinary Cinema sidebar with his
superior docu-drama Wanton Mee in
2016, Khoo’s second entry has embraced all of the gloss but learnt none of the
nuances that a genuinely moving picture would have to convey the complexities
of culture and human interactions through food—the most basal impulse of all.
What makes productions like Babette’s
Feast and Like Water for Chocolate
or even the TV serial Hannibal great
is not the glory of the food or what it represents directly, but rather the
processes and little stories that go into each step of the cooking that allows the completed meals to standalone as characters in their own rights, and not
just set pieces to an overcrowded dining table, for the audience to ogle with a voyeuristic bent. If films about food aim to be Anaïs Nin, Ramen Teh is one of those beasties that end up as Jeff Koons circa 1989.
In
earlier press engagements for Ramen Teh,
the eponymous dish was revealed to be an actual product available at Ramen
Keisuke, the namesake restaurant of the chef who cameoed as himself to provide
Masato with some guidance. Journalists were welcomed to sample the product, and
having tasted it, one would be convinced that the film was exactly like the
food it painstakingly strove to construct: passably tasty, suitably artificial,
and lacking both the bite and the richness that made its original inspirations
such iconic cultural artifacts in the first place.