film
Tina Muncaster
Gaye Poole
Reel Meals, Set Meals
Currency Press $24.95pb, 300pp, 0 868 19 578 2
No-one in my family had anything to say. They go off to their own rooms to stare at their own faces in the mirrors or to watch their own television. No-one even wants to be a vegetarian.
FOOD, BY ITS PHYSICAL or suggested presence in film, on stage and within other forms of art, presents, as Gaye Poole succinctly sums up in her introduction, a reverberative dimension that almost by default adds dramatic depth and colour to character and plot development. As Poole says:
Elizabeth Jolley, The Shepherd on the RoofIt is possible to 'say' things with food -- resentment, love, compensation, anger, rebellion, withdrawal. This makes it a perfect conveyor of subtext; messages which are often implicit rather than explicit, but surprisingly varied, strong and sometimes violent or subversive.
In the last decade food has been increasingly foregrounded as a rather funky narrative device, particularly in film. Babette's Feast; Tampopo ; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover ; Delicatessen and Like Water for Chocolate have become some of the old school of the genre, underpinned by classics such as La Grande Bouffe and Tom Jones. Scenes from When Harry met Sally and Nine and a Half Weeks have become popular cultural currency; the recently-released The Dinner Game continues a tradition that proves not everything happens at balls.
Perhaps I am not alone in being more familiar with films rather than theatre that foreground the edible and the oral, and Poole presents a fine refresher course through an impressive selection of plays and performance art events, Australian productions in particular.
From Tess Lyssiotis' stylised choreography of food preparation and service in The Forty Lounge Café to Spunner's Northern Territory dining rituals in Dragged Screaming to Paradise, the author assembles a fine line-up of Australian theatre using food as the critical subtext for dramatic explorations of social and cultural exchange. This alone makes Reel Meals, Set Meals a lively addition to Currency's list as well as to theatre studies in general.
The book's focus is not exclusively Australian, as was originally mooted, with local performances and films well-represented among an international cast. With food consumption and its accompanying social negotiations becoming more public across all cultures, both screen and script writers, Poole suggests, are recognising the potential of the dinner table as a handy structuring device for character denouement.
By drawing upon widely-recognised productions as well as lesser-known more local ones, Poole lends a depth to her investigations that may have have lost with a more limiting, parochial brief. Indeed, as she states from the outset, having embarked upon a study of this nature, food stops being so much scenic wallpaper and suddenly appears as a significant dramatic element everywhere:
From my perspective, being immersed in this project, it has sometimes come to seem to me that the films and plays are all about food, which, with a few exceptions, is not the case either ...the phenomenon of food as filmic and theatrical signifier is not always self-evident.
The book itself is arranged in thematic sections such as 'Cannibalism', 'Taboos' and 'Sex', each dealing with the role of food in various film and theatre scenes, travelling from the public domain to the more private. By using a dynamic organising principle, rather than following the more stolid logic of say, chronology, the author maintains much of the vitality and transgressional nature essential to her subject matter. This does result at times in an over-zealous amount of cross-referencing within each section, but the flow of the text remains and the multiple cross-references accommodate the more enquiring reader.
The sections which shone were those where the author more fully got to grips with the subtleties of using food to create either a blatant or a more hidden additional narrative. Martin Scorsese, in his film of Edith Wharton's book, The Age of Innocence, enthuses about his high-angle one-shot camera technique over the honeymoon dinner montage: 'Texture, it's all about texture...and that is one of the best ones of all because it looks like an Impressionist painting.'