Strand Releasing
There’s a sort of genre of movies that fit the ‘Let’s show great food and also toss in some emotional family stuff’ mold that pop up every year. Some are simple, enjoyable pleasures like Chef, others are pretentious slogs like Burnt. But there’s something always connective about the concept of family and food, the way it can connect you with your youth and the simplicity therein, or perhaps too the connection to a parent or relative that taught you a very special dish. It’s something I can relate it to, that’s for sure.
Ramen Shop (orgiinally called Ramen Teh), comes from director Eric Khoo and it too is all about food and family. Young adult Masato (Takumi Saito) lives in Japan, trying to learn how to become the next great Ramen chef and follow in his father’s footsteps. His mother was from Singapore and passed away when he was still a child, and soon after the movie starts, Masato’s father too passes on.
Alone now, Masato comes across the journal and old photo of his mother, entirely written in Mandarin, which he cannot read. As a child, he recalled living in Singapore with his Japanese father and Singapore mother, enjoying food from both cultures. So Masato decides to seek out his family history, and find out what happened to his mother and the family left behind.
An online blog series about local food in Singapore by a local bartender and mother named Miki (Seiko Matsuda) who shares a video about pork rib soup sparks a memory in Masato of his mother’s soup. So he tracks down Miki and explains his quest, and she, serving both a sort of odd mix of motherly and quasi-romantic role, decides to help him track down his family.
His uncle (Mark Lee) is a local chef, and their scene of reunion is basically a tear-inducing gut punch. This is all well and good, but then there’s his maternal grandmother, who won’t be so easy to reconnect with. The movie delves into some tough ideas, thoughts on awful history and prejudice. All throughout there is the joy of food.
Singapore is known internationally as a center of amazing food, and this movie knows it — there are frequent great shots of food being prepared, food being served, food being eaten. Might be a good idea to eat something beforehand. Treacly, obvious tinkly piano often plays over some of the more emotional scenes, but the sheer emotional content mostly pulls past this clichéd score.
I found Takumi Saito to be a fantastic actor at the center of the movie, with one particular scene of emotional catharsis that hit me quite hard after more than a few ‘hits’ in this movie. There’s an elemental theme and story here that is still fairly simple, and some of choices made (like the score) don’t always work, but there is beauty and understanding in the ways the material is elevated.
Although some of these dishes may not be any of my favorites, the director and DP know how to make it all look good. It’s a cliché to say, but the movie knows that the vital ingredient in any classic family dish is ‘love’ — here that is shown in moments and feelings, focuses on faces and the joyful slurps of culture synthesis and metaphor.
I really connect with Ramen Shop, which does take a bit to get going, but once it’s in Singapore, this is a cast of characters with emotion that you truly can believe.
Planning to see Ramen Shop? Click on the image below to see the movie, and be sure to come back and tell us what you thought!
Ramen Shop has a run time of 1 hour 29 minutes and is unrated.
Strand Releasing
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