Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s new film features a protagonist on a quest for culinary retribution — a triglyceride revenge trip that gets greasier and weirder along the way.
It presents, among its memorable moments, an epic feast of Thai cooking and an impressively stiff, posthumous erection. Morte Cucina, or Khrua Sao, had its Asian premiere on Oct 28 at the Tokyo International Film Festival, playing in the competition section. Thai audiences can look forward to its release some time next year.
The Thai filmmaker’s signature style is all here. Morte Cucina is a patiently observed character study, a women-led drama, a black comedy, and a bloodless murder story where the motif and methodology are best left unexplained here.
Pen-ek, known as a key figure in the Thai New Wave emerging in the late 1990s, constructs his latest film like a puzzle, a set of cubist fragments from which the narrative coalesces like slowly melted bitter sugar. You savour the taste, relish the unveiling of flavours, and this intriguing dish will leave you wanting for a little more in the end.
Enough with the gastronomic references, for Pen-ek doesn’t see this as a “food film”.
“The food is not the subject. It’s just the means, the path, the way to the character.” he said in Tokyo. “I think of it as two stories that perhaps become one in the mind of the viewer.”
At the centre is Sao (Bella Boonsang), a waitress with a steely resolve who meets, and later marries, a rich man called Korn (Kris Sripoomseth).
In a parallel story — the audience will naturally read this as a flashback — we follow another young woman in the rural South as she marries a Muslim local and later has a drunken encounter with a roguish stranger from Bangkok.
Sao, meanwhile, becomes an accomplished chef, pursuing the elemental cooking discipline where the chemistry of the ingredients transcends into physical and perhaps spiritual reactions. She enjoys cooking for Kris, plying him with endless processions of Thai food that make the table groan under the weight of the oily and exquisite dishes — curries, pan-fried, braised and boiled recipes. Her purpose of feeding him will slowly become apparent to us.
Bella gives Sao a charismatic gravity that keeps us glued to her mysterious gestures, while the permeating suspense keeps us guessing.
Shot by Christopher Doyle, known for his sensuous work in In The Mood For Love and other Wong Kar-wai films, Morte Cucina will likely be admired for its celebration of Thai cooking, even though, typical of Pen-ek’s brand of dark comedy, the film is probably a tale of anti-overconsumption, a playful warning that what fulfils you might also kill you. Love, food and sex included. In the pantheon of food films, Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast remains the perennially beloved, while the recent The Taste Of Things by Tran Anh Hung is a sublime marriage of French cooking and romantic actualisation.
It’s worth noting that while Thailand prides itself on its culinary tradition, hardly have we seen any films dedicated to the riches of the homegrown kitchen scene. Morte Cucina, for all its twists, will comfortably secure the honour.