‘Flux Gourmet’ Review: Yucky Performance Art Satire Serves Up Plenty of Gags, Few Laughs

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticEvery so often, a movie comes along that sends culinarily inclined audiences into rapture — “Babette’s Feast,” “Big Night” or “Like Water for Chocolate” spring to mind — getting eyes glistening and mouths watering in anticipation of a meal that only the characters will ever taste. “Flux Gourmet” is not that foodie movie.

In fact, “Flux Gourmet” may well send audiences running for the loo, or else reaching for the barf bag, coming about as close to triggering the gag reflux as a film can without actually jamming a finger down your throat.It’s doubtful that was quite the intention of writer-director Peter Strickland, the content-with-cult-status auteur behind “Berberian Sound Studio” and “In Fabric.” And yet, somewhere around the scene where alimentary performance artist Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamad) unscrews a stool sample cup and smears the dark chocolatey goo all over her face, audiences will be making like the sickly green Nauseated Face Emoji, if not the green-spewing Open Mouth Vomiting Emoji.

To call “Flux Gourmet” an acquired taste would be an understatement. It’s really more of an elaborate inside joke by Strickland on the peculiar relationship between artists and the institutions that fund, develop and encourage their folly.

Working from mouth to stomach to bowel, the film takes place over the course of a three-week residency at the Sonic Catering Institute, a highly specialized creative space — not dissimilar in feel from the lonelyhearts club in “The Lobster” — where experimental musicians are encouraged to, well, play with their food.Despite a fondness for Strickland’s earlier cinematic projects (especially lesbian lepidopterist oddity “Duke of Burgundy”), I’d somehow missed the.