‘Flux Gourmet’ Review: Peter Strickland makes a meal of art-horror
I’m tempted to believe that Peter Strickland’s peculiar brand of cinema is one of the film world’s great confidence tricks. Though it would be a stretch to call his film an out-and-out comedy, Flux Gourmet bares an uncanny resemblance to the absurdist comedian who bewilders their audience into guilty laughter. Many will take this stomach-turning offering as evidence of Strickland’s authority as a purveyor of dark-comedic experimentalism; an equal number will leave the cinema feeling as though they’ve missed the joke entirely.
Flux Gourmet focuses on an experimental art collective undertaking an artist’s residency in an English country manor. The institution’s matriarch, Jan Stevens – played by Gwendoline Christie – is the kind of maniac you can easily imagine directing an experimental season at the Royal Court. She pronounces the word investigation “invest-a-gassion”, floats around in frilly ruffs, and asks her artists to participate in bizarre Chekhov-style acting workshops set in an imaginary supermarket.
Jan Stevens is just one of the many eerie, sexually-deviant and troubled characters who speckle Flux Gourmet. There’s the resident physician, Dr Glock: a pedant with a taste for classics and a burning desire to conduct colonoscopies on a gassy journalist called Stones – played with quiet brilliance by Greek actor Makis Papadimitriou. Then you’ve got the members of the collective itself: Elle, Lamina and a mop-haired adolescent called Billy (Asa Butterfield), who, during his compulsory after-dinner speech, admits to having an egg fetish, much to the excitement of Jan. As Stones – forever hoping to find a place to fart in private – documents the trio’s artistic progress, Elle and Co. find themselves besieged by a rival collective who lost out on the residency. All the while, the group’s personal rivalries grow more pronounced.
Flux Gourmet is at its best when investigating the art world’s ridiculousness. Strickland’s comedy stems from his character’s faith in their convictions, their arrogance and their aloofness. They are so concerned with artistic integrity that they spend the entire film arguing about whether a flanger effect used in one of their audio-culinary performance-art pieces should be put on a lower setting. Strickland’s script is full of laugh-out-loud moments, though many of them leave you wondering if you’re laughing in earnest or simply to disguise the uneasiness growing steadily in the pit of your stomach. Flux Gourmet might not be a horror in the traditional sense, but it is as disturbing as any gore-fest.
Throughout the film, Strickland forms a series of stomach-turning juxtapositions. In the orgy scenes, bodies are worshipped and adored – maps of ecstasy and desire. For Stones, however, the body is a source of flatulence and discomfort. Food is similarly unruly. The human excrement Elle rubs over herself in the name of art turns out to be chocolate mousse, and human flesh is frequently indistinguishable from that of animals – an old horror trick. If Strickland’s objective here was to make a mockery of categorisation, then he has certainly succeeded. My only concern is that, in doing so, he has made a film in serious need of a binding agent.
