KITCHEN STORIES (SALMER FRA KJØKKENET)Directed by Bent Hamer. Starring Tomas Norström, Joachim Calmeyer, Bjørn Floberg, Reine Brynolfsson, Sverre Anker Ousdal, Leif Andrée. Club cert, 92 min
How delightful that the director of this touching Norwegian fable should be named Bent Hamer.
Suggestive as they are of a misshapen (and poorly spelled) household tool, those two words carry a gently surreal flavour quite in keeping with a film that is, paradoxically, as weird as it is mundane.
Set in the 1950s, Kitchen Stories follows the adventures of Folke (Tomas Norström), a researcher for the Swedish Home Research Institute, as he is dispatched to a remote part of Norway to report on the domestic habits of the single man.
His subject is the cautious Isak, who lives in an isolated farmhouse with only an elderly horse for company.
Sitting in a high chair not unlike those used by tennis umpires, Folke charts Isak's movements about his kitchen, mindful, at least at first, of his instructions not to interact with the elderly malcontent.
Almost immediately Isak has second thoughts about the project and begins cooking his food in his bedroom and observing the observer through a knothole in the floor.
Gradually, however, the two men open up the lines of communication and, much to the distress of a jealous neighbour, start to become friends.
There are flavours of Beckett in the absurd games Folke and Isak find themselves playing - a wordless exchange over a mislaid salt cellar is beautifully performed - but this is a moving, humane comedy with a tone all its own.
Much of the drama is played out in Norström's dejected face, which, through the tiniest twitches and the subtlest wrinkles, conveys its owner's slow realisation of his own loneliness and where a remedy may lie.
Should you wish to look for them, points are made about the preposterous way in which science sometimes seeks to impose an impossible order on the lovely randomness of life.
But Kitchen Stories, beautifully shot in clean colours and featuring a gorgeous jazz-tinged score by Hans Mathisen, works best as a celebration of the simple pleasures of friendship. The poignant coda, which skirts just the right side of sentimentality, could make a toad grin.
RATING: ****
