Reviews
Tampopo
A truck driver in a cowboy hat helps a widow improve her noodle shop. Around this, the film keeps stopping to follow strangers it has never mentioned before, and then returns as if nothing happened.
The digressions are the reason the film is still discussed. A gangster and his companion, an old woman in a supermarket, a dying mother, an etiquette class for eating spaghetti quietly — none of these connect to the main story, and all of them are about the same thing. The structure is an argument: appetite is not a subplot of a life, it runs alongside everything else.
The training film underneath
The central story is, quite openly, a sports film. The heroine is bad at something, acquires a coach, trains, is tested, and improves. Itami plays this absolutely straight, including a scene in which the broth is judged like a performance. Because the surrounding digressions are strange, the straightness of the centre reads as generosity rather than cliché.
Why it does not fall apart
Films that change register this often normally lose their audience, and the reason this one does not is rhythm. Each digression is introduced with the same visual grammar — a camera drifting off the main character onto somebody at the edge of frame — so the audience is taught the rule early and never has to be told it again.
See also Kitchen scenes, on cooking as performed competence.