A Touch of Spice.

A Touch of Spice

Directed by Tassos Boulmetis, Greece/Turkey, 2004,

A Touch of Spice (Politiki Kouzina) opens with a close-up of a woman's breasts and a baby; a sprinkling of sugar on the breast encourages the baby happily to latch on, while the narrator, in the first of a series of rather untranslatable puns, says, "My grandfather used to say that the word oneirevomai (dream) hides in it the word revomai (burp)." The subtle comic tone of the film and its key themes of food and identity, eating and feeling, leaving and returning, politics and Poll (short in Greek for Konstanstinoupoli) are playfully and effectively evoked.

Writer and director Tassos Boulmetis's semiautobiographical film is structured in three parts, titled "mezedes" (starters), "main dishes," and "desserts"--all introduced by elaborate digitally manipulated long takes setting the action in different spaces. A Touch of Spice tells the story of a forty-year-old astronomer, Fanis, and his grandfather, Vassilis, a grocery store owner in Istanbul. The first two parts consist almost entirely of flashbacks: set in Istanbul in the late 1950's, mezedes focuses on the character of the grandfather, who treated spices as a key to feelings. "Cinnamon," he says, "brings people together, makes them look at each other in the eyes; cumin, on the other hand, closes people off." Fanis's memories of his parents and extended family are mixed in with those of Saime, the Turkish girl with whom he fell in love as a child. But the nostalgic reminiscence ends with the family's traumatic and sudden deportation from Istanbul in the early 1960's.

Athens in 1964 is the location for the second act, the "main dishes." Young Fanis has difficulties assimilating into Greek society and institutions. He increasingly finds solace in cooking, testing, and refining the skills he learned from his grandfather. As his family, school, and church conspire to stop him from cooking, he attempts to escape to Istanbul by train, only to be stopped by the army, on the day of the military coup, April 21, 1967. History, once again, impedes his desires.

The "desserts" are set in the present: Fanis returns to Istanbul to visit his dying grandfather in hospital. At the funeral, he meets again with Saime, but the promise of a potential relationship does not materialize, as her estranged husband returns. On his own, Fanis revisits his grandfather's old grocery store to reminisce about his youth.

Food as metaphor for human relationships is not new in cinema. While the culinary culture of Greeks from Istanbul has a literary precedent in Maria Iordanidou's novel Loxandra (adapted as a television series in 1980), it has not been used in Greek cinema before. But the relative novelty of its subject matter is not the only strength of the film; the metaphors, here, are located in a particular place and time--that of Turkey and Greece in the second part of the twentieth century. Although the bittersweet tone of the film, its relative quirkiness, its sympathetic characters, and its visual appeal might be appealing to such international audiences as those who enjoyed Lasse Hallstrom's Chocolat (2000) or Gurinder Chadha's What's Cooking (2000), its spatio-temporal dimension gives it a particular resonance for Greek audiences.

There are two key historical references in the film, both of which have been traumatic events for a large number of Greeks, as well as the central character of the film: the deportation of ethnic Greeks from Istanbul and other parts of Turkey in the Twenties, Fifties, and early Sixties, and the military coup of 1967. While the film deals with the latter predominantly through comedy, the more complex intranational relationship with Turkey is dealt with sensitively, through the characters' personal relationships and through allusions to food. When Saime's estranged husband returns and finds Fanis cooking for her, he notices the cinnamon in the meatballs and comments that he has either arrived on time or too late. It is, however, too late for Fanis, who cannot recover his childhood love, just as he cannot change the past.

Although not engaging in nationalist rhetoric, the film conveys the sense of desire and loss that followed the deportation, but goes beyond it by suggesting the possibilities of a new beginning: the character does not get the girl, but he gets some work in Istanbul. Going beyond the fiction, the fact that the film, a Greek-Turkish coproduction, involves Turkish actors for the key roles of Saime and her husband, signals a not unprecedented but very welcome forward move in the relationship between the two nations. Also of note is that in Greece A Touch of Spice set an admissions record for a Greek language film, while it had respectable attendance in Turkey as well.--Lydia Papadimitriou (Liverpool)