Kitchen Stories

Herald rating: * * * *

As dry as the wind across the Arctic tundra, this Norwegian-Swedish co-production demonstrates that Finn Aki Kaurismaki is not the only Scandinavian master of the deadpan. It's a comedy of sorts - even if a Scandinavian comedy sounds as improbable as a self-effacing Australian - and while it's never a knee-slapper it's full of laugh-out-loud moments for anyone whose sense of humour tends towards the bizarre.

At times the film feels like Monty Python at its most extreme, yet it's based on little-known fact: in the 1950s, the Swedish Government did a major study of the domestic habits of the nation's housewives to see how kitchen designs might be improved. The study was all of a piece with the benign but intrusive social engineering that distinguished that and the subsequent decade and which has inspired oodles of critical art (I once read a Swedish short story that consisted entirely of a tellingly worded application form for a sickness benefit) but writer-director Hamer, a Norwegian, takes the idea one step further. The kitchen stories we see being compiled in this film are men's only. What's more, the men are Norwegian and the studies are being done by Swedes.

We don't need to know about the trans-national historical animosity here to appreciate the implications of this undertaking. In case we don't, Hamer has one subject spit at an observer at one point that "you were neutral observers during the war, too".

But Hamer distills the whole improbable concept down to the relationship between two men - the grumpy, elderly Isak (Calmeyer) in whose kitchen Folke (Norstrom) perches on a high seat, looking for all the world like a tennis umpire.

Most of the film's comic pleasures derive from the observer's determination to remain impartial and the observed's attempts to subvert the process of observation.

The fact that the two combatants will reach an uneasy truce which will ripen into something like friendship is predictable enough, but the way they do so is full of surprises and there is something exquisitely delicate, almost Chaplinesque, about the director's touch.

The film's retro look is a bonus. It goes beyond authenticity into a kind of hyper-reality which suits the material perfectly. This film is so offbeat that it's distinctly weird, but it's a hell of a lot of fun.

CAST: Joachim Calmeyer, Tomas Norstrom, Bjorn Floberg, Reine Brynolfsson
DIRECTOR: Bent Hamer
RUNNING TIME: 95 minutes
RATING: PG, coarse language
SCREENING: Lido