PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 2/19/04)

Although Kitchen Stories features an attempted murder and a surprise death, the actual mystery at the heart of Bent Hamer's quirky Norwegian "domestic comedy" is quite a different matter. In 1950s Scandinavia, the Home Research Institute (made up of the kind of post-war efficiency experts so often lampooned by Monty Python and similar sketch troupes) is waging a small but significant revolution throughout Europe's kitchens. Armed with clipboards and lab coats, HRI scientists meticulously document the typical Swedish housewife's movement about her kitchen, then suggest a way to redesign an ideal workspace for maximum productivity.

The HRI's newest project — and the real mystery of Kitchen Stories — is this: How do bachelors living alone behave in the kitchen? To tackle the question, 18 trained observers are dispatched to a farming community in Norway, where single men have volunteered to let these humorless foreigners invade their homes and monitor their domestic habits. To maintain the scientific integrity of the experiment, the observers live in tiny trailers outside their subjects' homes and avoid interacting with their subjects.

Of course, contact is inevitable under such absurd conditions. Even uptight Folke (Tomas Norström), perched on a wooden highchair overlooking Isak's kitchen space, can't resist reaching out to his antisocial subject (Joachim Calmeyer). Folke and Isak's friendship is a beautiful thing, unexpected but inevitable, and the movie does a delightful job of shaping it. Isak, who has always lived alone, slowly warms to the idea of having a stranger in his house, while Folke puts aside some of his Swedish snobbishness and learns to accept the foreigner as an equal.

The official Norwegian selection for the Academy Awards (although not among the final Foreign Language nominees), Kitchen Stories offers a subtle contrast between Swedish and Norwegian customs, the nuances of which American audiences aren't likely to recognize. Still, so much of the movie works on a universal human level that it should easily capture hearts around the world. In the end, it's not the answer to the kitchen mystery that matters but the revelation that there's ultimately no difference between this bachelor scientist and his bachelor subject.

—Peter Debruge