Building off our recent interest in foreign and independent films, Len and I went to see Kitchen Stories tonight, a Norwegian film about an absurd post-WWII Swedish study of the kitchen habits of Norwegian bachelors. The study is done to increase knowledge for designing a more efficient kitchen space, and the movie becomes a showcase for the idea that the act of being observed changes things, and that sometimes the observer becomes the observed.
Kitchen Stories features a home researcher named Folke Nilsson who is one of a handful of researchers sent to the hinterlands of Norway to study the kitchen habits of single male Norwegian farmers. His host, Isak, is an old man who clearly has no interest at all in having some strange person sit in his kitchen and observe him (he only signed up for the study for the free horse, which turned out to be a toy horse). In this bizarre and surreal study, the Swedish observers sit in high tennis referee-like chairs in the corners of the kitchen and are given strict instructions never to interact with their hosts so that they don't disrupt the routines they're trying to study.
Isak clearly doesn't like having someone in his kitchen observing him, and this very fact immediately disrupts his routine; he begins cooking his meals in his bedroom, and after the rare times he's actually in his kitchen, he very pointedly turns out the light on Folke, who's finding it difficult to do his research with such a host.
But after a mishap that requires Folke to interact with Isak, they begin talking. Once the floodgates open, the two become friends. Soon, Folke's all-too-serious boss begins berating him about disrupting the study. And all the time, Isak's friend Grant observes the growing friendship and begins to get jealous of Folke, and dangerously so. Folke soon learns that Isak has been observing him as well, and Folke's colleague Green, who has a host down the road from him, shows up at his trailer one night in a drunken stupor ranting that one cannot properly observe another human without interacting with them.
There were really two stories in Kitchen Stories. The first is the friendship that grows between Folke and Isak. The movie is a comedy here, and I remember what Len told me the night we looked at the poster and decided to see it: "Norwegians aren't funny!" Now I know they are, but they're just very subtle about it. Very, very subtle.
The other sub-story educated me a bit on the relationship between Sweden and Norway, something I'm completely unfamiliar with. At the beginning of the movie, Folke's boss is describing his disgust at having to drive on the left as he goes from Sweden to Norway, and how it made him want to vomit. It sets the tone for the broader scope of Folke and Isak's relationship, that of a Swede and a Norwegian. At one point, Isak casually comments that the Swedes were casual observers during the war, too, which in the setting of the movie had only occured maybe a decade prior. There is clearly tension there, and Isak and Folke occasionally run up against it, but their friendship smooths out these bumps. This part of the movie made me want to learn more about the relationship between Sweden and Norway, both the political one and the cultural one.
Both Len and I really enjoyed the movie. It was a very sweet movie with a bittersweet ending I won't give away (I had hopes that the movie would end slightly differently, namely that Folke would return before the critical moment). The comedy was very light and subtle, and the drama was as well. At the risk of getting too melodramatic here, it had a lilt to it that was very much like the Norwegian language: rolling ups and downs that sort of take you along gently.
I've learned a little Norwegian in my life, some from my grandfather when I was a kid and some as an adult when I began studying it on my own, and I had such a hard time understanding the Norwegian in the film (it was subtitled in English). I can read Norwegian pretty easily, but something about the spoken language escapes me — I have difficulty discerning words, even in sentences I would know immediately upon reading.
So the accent just eludes me. I was expecting that here, but I'd hoped to be able to at least understand some of it. I wondered if my inability to understand at least some of it was due to the fact that Isak was a remote farmer, which I'm guessing would be like a non-English speaker trying to understand someone from the Appalachians. I also noticed that Folke said "Jo" when he said "Yes" instead of "Ja" as you say in Norwegian; I wondered if the Swedes in the film were speaking Swedish and the Norwegians were speaking Norwegian. This would be about right if what I learned is true, that the two languages can be understood easily by their speakers, almost as if they were dialects of the same language (which I don't think is far from the linguistic truth). This also would have made it difficult for me to understand about half the dialogue in the movie.
I recommend you see the movie if a calm and gentle comedy/drama is your thing. We certainly loved it. Next on the list is Intermission, which we're going to have to see before Thursday if we want to catch it in the theatre.