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Still Life With Humans
Kitchen Stories is quiet, humane comedy
by Jack Neely
On the surface, Kitchen Stories wouldn’t seem like a promising concept, a motion picture that would attract actual ticket buyers. In postwar Scandinavia, Swedish scientists of the Home Research Institute are preoccupied with improving kitchen design. One scientist, Folke Nilsson (Tomas Norstrom), is sent in a trailer to observe the kitchen habits of one particularly quiet Norwegian bachelor farmer, Isak Bjornsson (Joachim Calmeyer) with strict orders not to talk to the subject. For over an hour, we observe Folke’s observing. The scientist places his lifeguard chair in the poor man’s humble kitchen and watches him make coffee. Or, as is more generally the case, not make coffee. It turns out that the eccentric farmer does most of his cooking on a hotplate in his bedroom.
For a while the winter scenery seems so bleak, the positivistic science so cold, and the all-male cast so humble and plain that even the old Volvos start to look, by contrast, voluptuous.
However, even in this cold, remote location, among seemingly dull characters, texture emerges, and in that texture, the humor of the absurd situation. As the scientist sits in his high chair observing kitchen habits, he learns that the farmer has more of a life than scientists might have realized, tending to a critically ill horse, guarding a secret cache of an exotic commodity in a storeroom, and enjoying, in his way, a complicated relationship with his only regular visitor; though the most intimate contact he has with that neighbor is cutting his hair.
The farmer and the scientist, slowly realizing that they’re both victims of this weird project, develop a sly friendship. As they get to know each other better, we come to understand that neither of them is quite as dull as he seems. The dialogue hints at a few subtexts, including a comparison of the neutrality of the scientists to the neutrality of Sweden during the recent world war. It also raises an old question that has bothered conscientious reporters for a century: whether we can observe human behavior without changing it. At one point, the farmer’s obliged to console the scientist, whose contribution to the experiment is disintegrating: “It isn’t your fault that I observe, too.”
The scientist seems to discover that he is, himself, the subject of another, unplanned but probably more interesting experiment.
The movie is, chiefly, a situation comedy, and humor turns the plot. Folke’s rulebound inability to share in a genuinely funny joke is a turning point in his perspective toward the farmer. At the matinee showing we attended, there were two distinct groups of apparently Scandinavian bilinguals in the theater who laughed at the dialogue before the subtitle had fully materialized. Sometimes, though not always, the humor translated well.
European directors seem somehow able to get away with something American directors either can’t get away with, or don’t try. It’s a certain deadpan cuteness, a gratuitous quirkiness whose plea to the audience to respond to something that’s “not normal” is open and direct. A man in an overcoat, tie, and fedora, solemnly standing on a ladder staring into an old man’s bedroom. Or, later, seated in a high chair in the grizzled farmer’s kitchen. This perspective worked for Chaplin 70 or 80 years ago, but might seem corny or self-indulgent in the hands of a modern American director. The Scandinavians behind me laughed at Kitchen Stories, and often I laughed, too. But when I did I wondered whether I would have laughed at the same scene played in American accents.
It’s a humane movie, but sometimes lapses toward gratuitousness. What the farmer’s jealous friend does with the scientist’s trailer would, in the real world, seem a symptom of a severely troubled mind, and in most cultures would constitute a capital felony. But in the movie, it’s played for laughs, shrugged off as one more of those cute, endearing things that bored Norwegian bachelors do, and maybe the fellow’s a good guy after all.
Grant’s murderous hijacking of Folke’s trailer is the closest the movie comes to having an action sequence; Kitchen Stories has only one thing in common with any action movie, in fact, and that’s that most of the movie does not require many words to convey its message. In Swedish and Norwegian, it’s well subtitled, but there are, in fact, long stretches with no words at all, as motions and glances which might pass unnoticed in any city scene take on profound meaning. On some level, Kitchen Stories is a Scandinavian Lost in Translation: the story of an unlikely friendship in trying circumstances, enabled only by shared humor.
May 20, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 21
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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