Juana Martinez (Diana Elizabeth Torres) is a single mother from an immigrant household in Southern California. She and her father (Rodrigo Duarte Clark) are working several jobs trying to make ends meet. They get up in the middle of the night to buy fruit for their convenience snack stand, and then work late in other jobs. A change of jobs brings Juana into the world of Sushi and she is immediately fascinated by the craft. She wants to become a Sushi chef herself, but conservative cultural attitudes stand in the way. The entire film is telling the story of her uphill struggle, which comes on top of the general harshness of her family’s immigrant life.
We do not know if Juana is a first or second generation immigrant. At home she speaks Spanish with her widowed father and mainly English with her young daughter. The child’s absent father is never referred to.
In the restaurant and the general world of Sushi, a lot of Japanese is spoken, so the film is juggling with three languages.
The cast is well-chosen and they do a fine job creating believable characters. The character constellation created by the screenplay also helps.
This is, however, a rather middling film. It is supposed to be a feel-good film and a declaration of love to Sushi, while at the same time being a drama describing the hardships of immigrant life; while it is also a film of the wide-ranging “devoting-your-energy-to-a-thing-and-becoming-good-at-it” genre like Julie & Julia, Queen of Katwe, etc.
Yet the film’s tone reminded me too much of Guten Tag, Ramón: the soft, generic score, the story’s by-the-numbers approach, and the film’s general pace. While East Side Sushi is well-crafted and looks nice, its tone seems to drag it towards Lifetime or Hallmark territory. It also feels too slow and – at 106 minutes – too long.
The film has a few strong elements as well. The camera department does its best to try to present Sushi as an intriguing art form. And there is a televised cooking competition in the film where writer/director Anthony Lucero nicely emulates the feel and editing of these types of shows.
Thematically, the film deals with low-key racism and sexism, with the “American Dream”, the territory of fusion food and the associated nonsense of “cultural appropriation” accusations. In an interview, Lucero, for whom this film is the feature-film debut, said he wanted the audience to think about the question “What is authentic food? […] To make Thai food, do you need to be from Thailand … ? […] Can somebody from Poland make good Mexican food?”
East Side Sushi has won many awards. But, as I said, for me it is a middling film, so roughly in the 5-out-of-10 territory, like Guten Tag, Ramón. But it has to be said that it does not feel nearly as pointless as Guten Tag, Ramón does, so it has that going for it. And while East Side Sushi may not exactly be intellectually demanding, it does not insult your intelligence the way Guten Tag, Ramón does.
Regarding my rating I should also stress that I am probably not the target audience for the film; which I assume to be female, and possibly (but not necessarily) trending older.
Latin American Film Reviews 