Sushi Sushi (1991) - film review

Forty-something university arts lecturer Maurice Hartmann has grown tired of his predictable life and longs for a change.  When one of his students, a young Japanese man named Kiyoshi, gives him a platter of sushi as a leaving present, he has a brainwave.  Why not start up his own sushi home delivery company?  With the help of Kiyoshi, his girlfriend Claire and a decorator Manu, he goes into partnership with small businessman Richard, financing his new enterprise with a loan from his ex-wife.  Despite the enthusiasm of his team, Maurice fails to sell the concept of raw fish to the Parisians and his business ends in bankruptcy.  He is about to give up when one of his few customers, the wealthy entrepreneur Bertrand Casier, offers him capital to expand his business.  With the support of his new sponsor, Maurice is soon running a highly profitable company, but he soon finds that this success comes at a price...

A reaction to the soulless, excessive commercialisation of the 1980s, Sushi Sushi is a well-intended social comedy but it somehow ends up being too mired in cliché to get its message across effectively.  Buoyed up by a talented and likeable cast, the first half of the film makes an entertaining divertissement, although it runs out of momentum and ideas by the midpoint and the second half is much less engaging.  With endless shots of raw fish being cut up, the film does occasionally feel like a TV cookery show, one that definitely will not win over those who (like myself) consider sushi a culinary abomination.

There are a few dollops of Pythonesque humour along the way (nuns refusing to accept charity and an Orientalised Michel Aumont preparing to commit hara-kiri), but these seem incongruous and weaken the film’s underlying message, which is that if you want a fulfilled life, you should not sell your soul to big business.  Whilst it may not be perfect, Sushi sushi is an amiable little film which continues to resonate in a world where a quick profit it still prized above human worth.

This is the film in which André Dussollier and Catherine Frot appeared together for the first time, albeit briefly.  Fifteen years later they would form one of French cinema’s most effective double acts, the crime-fighting duo Prudence and Bélisaire Beresford in Pascal Thomas’s Mon petit doigt m’a dit... (2005) and Le Crime est notre affaire (2008) - with Frot scarcely looking a day older.

© James Travers 2010

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