Kitchen Stories

A Swedish film that’s completely barmy, but in such a quiet, deadpan, Scandinavian way that you don’t realize this until a good while after you’ve watched it. Hamer’s ... more >

A Swedish film that’s completely barmy, but in such a quiet, deadpan, Scandinavian way that you don’t realize this until a good while after you’ve watched it. Hamer’s film is loosely based on research conducted by the Swedish Home Research Institute in the 1950s, which discovered that a well-designed kitchen would mean that instead of a housewife having to walk to the equivalent of the Congo in a year to get the food on the table, she need only walk to Northern Italy. Here, the Institute sends eighteen observers to rural Norway to observe the eating habits of single men. Researchers take to the road towing their little green caravans and are given an oversized high chair in the corner of a kitchen. Theoretically, they are not allowed to speak or in any way influence their subjects’ behaviour, but of course natural human curiosity and interaction soon take over and mutual distrust gives way to the sharing of coffee, tobacco, sausages, and eventually alcohol and birthday cakes - much to the Institute director’s consternation. Filled with images of the everyday surreal that will appeal to anyone familiar with such films as Dagur Kari’s Noi Albinoi and Aki Kaurismaki’s The Man Without A Past, this is an nicely quirky and understated comedy about the oddities and inescapability of human relations. < less

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