The Last Recipe

Sasaki, once a famous chef and now cooking last requests for people who are dying, is offered a strange job: to find a menu that disappeared seventy years ago. The trail takes him to pre-war Manchuria, to the most ambitious project of imperial Japanese cuisine, and to the story of the cook who assembled it. Along with the recipes, what happened in that period comes out too. Yojiro Takita's film ties two times together: the kitchen of today and Manchuria during the war years. Food here is a matter of memory as much as skill; a recipe also carries the lives of the people who made it. Takita had already won the foreign language Oscar with Departures, and the tone built on death and farewell is present here as well. Kazunari Ninomiya and Hidetoshi Nishijima carry the two periods.