Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang serves amusing confusion in his new film Morte Cucina... and dishes dirt in Tokyo. 

Veteran Thai film director Pen-ek Ratanaruang is the kind of lovable rogue with whom film festivals love to adorn themselves. Both as examples of their craft (of course), but also in a knowing way that suggests that the festival programmers are in on the joke. 

Ratanaruang’s latest feature, culinary murder tale Morte Cucina, debuted at a film festival in Spain’s San Sebastian, a city with a global reputation for cuisine, and popped up again in November  in Tokyo, another foodie city.

The film’s plot is minimal, involving a woman chef who finds herself working for a man who abused her many years earlier. And, as revenge is a dish best served cold, she sets about using her kitchen skills to slowly bring him to his knees. She does not employ poison, but rather a folk-myth menu of foods and ingredients from the wrong season. 

There is little more than that to the story, but Morte Cucina is a visual feast of food preparation sequences and mouthwatering dishes, borne of Ratanaruang’s reunion with ace cinematographer Chris Doyle, with whom he worked previously on Last Life in the Universe and Invisible Waves. 

In a Tokyo festival talk-session, Ratanaruang gave no hint that there was any more depth to Morte Cucina than a sheet of rice paper. But a glass of beer to hand, his wry observations on filmmaking in general and candid recollections of past dealings with Japan were more than many local filmmakers would dare to venture. 

He recalled being persuaded to approach Miike Takashi, the prolific Japanese director known for his gangster films, to appear as an actor in Last Life. Despite Ratanaruang being terrified of the glowering Miike, the decision was a masterful one. Not only did Miike agree to the role, he also handled casting and costume design for the host of Yakuza [gangster] characters. Then, when they got to Osaka for a week of location shooting, Miike additionally became locations manager and facilitator. 

“Everywhere else in the world when you shoot on the street, you ask permission from the police. But in Osaka, you ask for permission from the Yakuza. So, Miike did all the permissions for us because he knows all the Yakuza. They really admire him, because he makes them look so elegant in his films”, Ratanaruang said. “Then in the evenings, with four bodyguards, we’d get taken to dinner by the Yakuza”.

But an encounter with Ratanaruang is frequently bittersweet. The inspired decision to call on Miike for production help was tinged with having to put up with his woeful thespian skills. “Miike really is a terrible actor. He always stands out,” Ratanaruang ventured.

Ratanaruang used the Tokyo talk session to explain his admiration for professional actors.

“To appear in front of a camera and pretend to be a person dying of AIDS or a father who is a child abuser, is already so brave”, he said. “And then, when the director says ‘cut’ they have to come back down to Earth”.

He lavished particular praise on Asano Tadanobu, the Japanese star of a dozen indie films. Ratanaruang credits Asano with changing his directing style after deploying him in Last Life. 

Scheduling conflicts meant that Asano was unable to join the production for the two weeks of rehearsals that Ratanaruang favours, and which the auteur normally uses to finalise the screenplay and dialogue. 

“I could not control much and instead had to watch what was happening. Asano is so attentive, so minimal, that he barely seems to be acting. But what he does shapes the style of the film. I learned that the camera is there not to capture action, but emotion”.

Another time on the same production, Asano halted preparations for a scene by asking for a comb. One was found for him. He pocketed it and never used it for the shot. 

“He explained to me afterwards that the character was always so neat and tidy that it seemed obvious that he would carry a comb, just in case”, said Ratanaruang. “And having the comb helped Asano develop his character”.

Asano plays a brief supporting role in Morte Cucina as a pretentious art dealer who hangs a collection of empty frames in a gallery and suggests that viewers should supply their own meaning. A smudged fingerprint on one of the works illustrates the point perfectly and is an archetypically Ratanaruang moment of knowing humour.

When asked to explain some of the tangled and confusing storylines or weird and ambiguous characters in the film, Ratanaruang deflects. 
“These days in places like Bangkok, you hear more Japanese or English on the streets than Thai. It’s actually very good. Your world expands,” he said. “Borders don’t matter any more. Language doesn’t matter any more. We all communicate by the most common language in the world – broken English. Broken English is the best language”.

- By Patrick Frater

▶ Published in ContentAsia's December 2025 Magazine