Jídlo

The film goes as the summary tells but it is much more than that. Otherwise it would be another boring idea with no details. The major focus is on the lunch, other meals appearing to be only preface and epilogue, which is pacing faster and faster to reach a point of craziness at one time dumbfounding and mesmerizing. The contest and contrast between two diners are not on how fast we can eat but on what can be eaten and how do we eat them.

This short piece is a good example because the audience feels that it refers to something which cannot be clearly identified, thus allows for multiple explanations. You can substitute 'eat' with various other words, to see what you get there, and you are no where near the director's idea. Maybe he didn't have one at all!

What strikes me about this movie it is how little I can give to make much sense of it. I guess it has some social comments on it, about our consumption and our consumerism society, on life and everything else. But most importantly, it doesn't really matter, you get to just experience, pay attention and to be in that state of not getting it. I think that might be the experience to have, unlearning things. Turning them upside down, to transform them. In a personal level it affected me, after seeing a sequence of his shorts and this one, to be more conscious on how we act and driven our desires, you know that feeling of salivating when you think about a bacon sandwich, it has stopped, and it was interesting to be that far apart, to change that programming to one that wasn't completely destructive and irrational.

All this conversation, reminded me of that Elliott Smith song called, "A distorted reality is now a necessity to be free."

It's an apt title and solo-focus for Food to be a Jan Svankmajer short; he's obsessed with it, in case you couldn't tell from his other movies (it's used sometimes to ridiculous amounts in Little Otik), and in both playful and gleefully deranged ways. In this short we see his knack at mixing live-action and stop-motion as two gentlemen at a table have plates of food and eat them up... then they eat the forks, then the plates, then the table, then the chairs, not to mention their clothes, and we see how their mouths suddenly flip over to stop-motion for just that bit of mastication and then back to the real human forms. There's also the great bit with the man as a kind of cash-register of food as people sit down and at the flick of a button on his jacket get plastic forks and other things to munch down on their lot of good. Sometimes its disgusting, and at the end when actual body parts get in the mix of things (including, not too undeservedly, a penis and testicles, which actually are the dividing line that isn't crossed) it's downright crude, but it's downright raunchy and crazy and quintessentially Svankmajer. The icing on the cake, of course, is the Blue Danube used as the two naked men munch on their table.

When I see something like this, I start to think of David Lynch. I've always contended that Lynch has made a career out of putting his nightmares on film. From Eraserhead to Twin Peaks we are haunted by the indifference of the world and the bizarre figures that inhabit it. This is all about the consumption of food, where everything we do is related to eating. But what this film does with gross but stunning animation is brings these strange things to us and perhaps create new nightmares. for us.

Very funny surrealist partially animated dark comedy. It is divided in three segments with independent weird situations: breakfast, lunch and dinner. The first one is by far my favourite, and I would give it a 4.5. I laughed out loud! Luch is also good, and reminds me the style of another famous film by Svankmajer, Virile Games/Manly Games; however, it is the less impressive, and I rate it with a 3.5. The dinner segment, the shortest, have a 4.0 and it is quite funny and cheeky.