When filmmakers want to hint at sexual desire on screen, they could do worse than reach for an egg. Think of Luca Guadagnino’s sun-dazed romance Call Me by Your Name, when the sight of jet-lagged American houseguest Oliver wolfing down a soft-boiled egg presages something more than a hearty breakfast appetite, a feeling captured in the darkly complicated look on the face of his soon-to-be lover. Or the symbolic hard-boiled egg offered by a lonely janitor to a scaly fish-man that precipitates an unconventional romance- andinterspecies sex – between woman and amphibious creature in Guillermo del Toro’s fantasy The Shape of Water.
Even the poisonous mushroom omelette meticulously prepared and served in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is a twisted gesture of love, as is its recipient’s willingness to eat it. Some directors have been more explicit. In Juzo Itami’s paean to ramen, Tampopo, a raw egg plucked from a room service trolley is inventively put to use by a yakuza gangster and his moll, who pass the yolk back and forth between their mouths before it finally breaksall over the woman’s white blouse. They follow this up by commandeering a live prawn to tickle her flesh. More slapstick is the sex scene in Hot Shots!, in which Charlie Sheen fries eggs and rashers of bacon on his paramour’s sizzling stomach – which is, of course, a spoof of cinema’s most famous use of food as foreplay: Mickey Rourke feeding a blindfolded Kim Basinger a gut-churning smorgasbord of appetizers by the light of an open fridge in 9½ Weeks.
Doing his best to cover all the food groups, Rourke serves up eggs, olives, maraschino cherries, straw-berries, jelly, honey, jalapeño peppers, cough syrup and a mammoth glass of milk. Basinger didn’t find the experience quite as seductive as her character appears to. “Jesus, it was sickening”, she told Rolling Stone. “I tried to spit everything into a bucket, but some of it slipped down.”
“Saucy Egg’s” © 2022 The Gourmand from The Gourmand’s Egg. A Collection of Stories & Recipes Hardcover, 20 x 27.9 cm, 1.16 kg, 288 pagine, 40 euro, taschen.com
