Kitchen Stories is an extremely low-key exploration on culture clash. Set in the forward-thinking 1950s, a Swedish research group launches a study of kitchen ergonomics. Having successfully analyzed the housewife’s routine, the next step is focusing on single males. Folke is one of the scientists dispatched to the frigid Norwegian countryside. His host is an aging, curmudgeonly farmer named Isak, who regrets volunteering and refuses to let Folke in. He eventually opens the door, and Folke sets up for work in a towering chair in a corner of the kitchen. The researchers are under strict orders not to interact with their subjects, and Isak deliberately remains inactive to spoil the study, so there is little action or dialog for a good part of the film. Instead there is a tense and funny deadlock between the men waiting for each other to make a move. Slowly they begin to come alive, out of longing for human companionship. Folke gets more involved in his subject’s daily life, while Isak turns the tables and secretly watches the scientist through a hole in the ceiling. I’m sure I missed a lot of the cultural significance about the differences between the men’s home countries, but the criticism towards Sweden’s neutral observer role in World War II is clear. Things fall apart when the head of the study gets wind of his workers breaking the walls between themselves and their subjects, and Folke is fired. By that point the rational-minded scientist and the country bumpkin have become fast friends, both realizing the folly of the study. It’s a sweet story that exceeds its small setting.

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