The Taste of Tea, and of Jerkey-Bourbon

Went to MonkeyTown last night to see a movie called The Taste of Tea, and to see MonkeyTown itself.

MonkeyTown is–well, it’s a restaurant, let’s start with that. It’s a kind of futurist, high-concept, food-as-performance sort of restaurant. (Needless to say, it’s in Williamsburg.) The menu features a “futurist cookbook” and a seared foie gras with smoked grapes; and the cocktails are equally imaginative (beet-dill infused vodka, anyone?). Sadly, their liquor license is suspended, and I was intimated by the entree prices, so I just got the soup. The smoked chicken was a nice touch, but largely underwhelming.

The viewing experience, though, was overwhelming. First, the setup: a spare, white room with a high ceiling, low couches around the perimeter, and huge projection screens on each wall. If you can’t afford to fill yourself with food, you can get stuffed with visual stimulus.

The movie itself was incredible. It did for rural Japan what True Stories did for rural Texas. Or something. The logic of the film was strange, even fanastical, but ultimately elegant. It was, in a sense, just a simple story about one very likeable family. The point is, for a contemporary, experimental Japanese film, it was surprisingly accessible and heart-warming.

Some have called The Taste of Tea non-narrative. I disagree. It did have narrative; just not too much. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Time moved linearly, for the most part. There was plenty of plot and character development. But writer/director Katsuhito Ishii was willing to slow down, to have fun, to take unexpected turns, to suspend the laws of exposition (and of nature), all for the sake of capturing the small moments that, in the end, make films worth watching.