Nourriture

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.

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!

Jan Svankmajer has portrayed many wacky things, but "Jidlo" is a whole new level. Portraying bizarre things happening during each meal, he goes all out. The first vignette "Breakfast" seems to be a slight repeat of his earlier movie "Et Cetera". The most eye-opening vignette is "Lunch", in which two men at a table can't get the waiter's attention, and resort to eating their plates, utensils, clothes, and even the table...but they don't intend to stop there. With "Dinner", Svankmajer decides to be grosser than the Farrelly brothers could ever dream of being.

Maybe this isn't Svankmajer's best movie ever, but it's still worth seeing.

Food is like a surreal comedy horror that comments on humanity's relationship with food, all through the lens of Jan Svankmajer's filmmaking lens of stop-motion and live-action mixing, making up for some truly fever-dream-like stories! For a short film it's got a lot of story in its three brief sequences: Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner.

Food is probably one of the truest films about dining, and possibly one of the greatest criticisms of communism encouraging people 'eating off each-other' (at least that's my interpretation of the Breakfast segment); Lunch's critique of classism in that regard is also very sharp, and Dinner's indulgence of 'eating your own body parts' is comically dark stuff at its finest.

The 1990s were really a remarkable time for stop-motion cinema and Food was something of a radical film in a post-Wallace-&-Gromit world (A Grand Day Out was released in 1989). Also it was an achievement for the Czech Republic finally breaking free from its communist trappings and restrictions on filmmaking.

Food is good stuff; it's plentiful and satirical on what it's covering, and shows the cross-quadrant world of dining and how every experience says something about the consumer (and their priorities) and what they do to get by.

Food is a 4/5 star film. 8/10 IMDb points. It's not for everyone, but it certainly says a lot about all of us. It's like a cerebral stop-motion film. And a good one at that.

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.