‘Flux Gourmet’ Film Review: Peter Strickland’s Culinary Art-Happening Hungers for Sonic Truth
thewrap.comElle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed) and her collaborators Billy Rubin (Asa Butterfield) and Lamina Propria (Ariane Labed), all of whom rise, walk and smoke in sync — at first, anyway, before the friction and infighting begins — the prospect of freedom to create their specialized brand of performance is a dream come true.
Together they pantomime the process of grocery shopping, attach microphones, effects-generating equipment and amps to their prep stations, then chop and cook vegetables like stylish monks in materialist prayer.But Elle di Elle is a control queen to rival The Fall’s Mark E.
Smith, and it’s her way or the highway. Intentionally transgressive, a master of crafting conceptual packaging for her work, she’s a one-woman Viennese Actionism movement, with a desire to “go further and further into oblivion,” and given to smearing her naked body with various condiments, sauces — and more — in performances (one of which vibrantly evokes Diamanda Galas’s blood-soaked “Plague Mass”).
Elle is also indecisive, quick to blame others for mistakes (she drops a bottle of olive oil on a staircase and makes her bandmates clean it up), determined not to give an inch to her colleagues ideas or to Jan Stevens’ routine yet insidious suggestions and notes, and angry when contradicted.Rounding out the dysfunctional ensemble is Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), a man with an upset stomach.
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