E-Mail This Article to a Friend Norwegian would Kitchen Stories offers warmth and sustenance BY PETER KEOUGH
	Kitchen Stories Directed by Bent Hamer. Written by Jörgen Bergmark and Bent Hamer. With Tomas Norström, Joachim Calmeyer, Bjørn Floberg, Reine Brynolfsson, Sverre Anker Ousdal, Leif Andrée, and Lennart Jähkel. In Swedish and Norwegian with English subtitles. An IFC Films release (91 minutes). At the Brattle.

Norwegian director Bent Hamer pays a cockeyed homage to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona with the opening of his slow-starting but ultimately delightful and moving Kitchen Stories. The film goes off its sprockets and burns — it is, in fact, an industrial short about the Swedish Home Research Institute, a 1950s organization striving to streamline the Scandinavian dream home by testing wacky new products and observing the ergonomics of typical households.

Its latest project is to study the homemaking behavior of bachelors in frozen rural Norway, and Folke (Tomas Norström) is one of several researchers posted in a high chair in a bewildered subject’s kitchen. His "host," Isak (Joachim Calmeyer), regrets volunteering for the study (he had been promised a horse, not knowing it would be a tiny, carved wooden one), especially since Folke, according to the rules of "positivistic" research, must remain silent and uninvolved while taking notes and drawing diagrams of Isak drinking coffee or staring into space or shuffling from place to place.

It’s kind of a variation on the relationship between Bibi Andersson’s attending nurse and Liv Ullmann’s mute patient in Bergman’s film, except in this case both characters are more or less mute. A lot lingers in the silence, though, and in the longueurs from one seemingly uneventful scene to the other. And as opposed to what happens in Bergman’s masterpiece, a lot of the silence in Kitchen Stories is pretty funny. Isak’s mute annoyance vies with Folke’s unspoken discomfort and the audience’s own uneasiness until the tension is punctured by such gags as a snapped-off light or a misplaced salt shaker. Like Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, Hamer has mastered the technique of the long take with a quick cut to a wordless punch line.

He also has an eye for the precise but weird visual detail. At the beginning of the film, a caravan of the Swedish observers drive down a snowy road to their assignments, their identical pale-green egg-shaped trailers attached to their identical egg-shaped Volvos (another scene, where a trailer mirrors a little girl’s pram, almost pushes the image too far). Later, when Isak takes his semi-annual bath, a screen placed before his middle shimmers with a painting of some snowy midnight clear. I’m not even going to try to figure out what that means, but it looks uncanny and magical. Perhaps the most compelling visual effects, though, are provided by the two actors: Calmeyer’s hawk-like beak, broken nails, and wild hair; Norström’s implacable, polite sadness, neatly knotted tie, and stocking feet.

Of course, the artificial distance between the two men breaks down (the first step is the above-mentioned incident with the salt shaker), and they recognize that they are only two lonely souls in the middle of a frozen wilderness. Even so, relationships are complicated. There are no women here (one occasionally descends from the sky; she is the secretary of the project’s head, and they seem to be engaged in a perpetual party in his airplane), but there is Grant (Bjørn Floberg), Isak’s eccentric (a relative term in these parts) neighbor, who grows jealous of Isak’s growing closeness to the Swedish stranger. And there’s Isak’s ailing horse. If the film has need for improvement, it is in filling out these relationships, especially the one with the horse.

But as a study of how humans can understand each other, it succeeds. Isak gently chides Folke for his belief that there can ever be or should be "neutral observation" (Sweden was such an observer when Norway was getting reamed by the Nazis, he points out). That doesn’t stop him from neutrally observing Folke through a hole drilled in the ceiling above him, or from making his own diagrammed observations of his observer in Folke’s notes. A kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle of human interactions is at work here, untraceable by positivistic science or sentimental platitudes, but glimpsed by Hamer’s gentle absurdity, his respect for silence, and his recognition of our common bond of solitude.