Features of the Swedish-Norwegian friendship After Swedish scientists thoroughly studied the behavior of the housewife in the kitchen, making a detailed map of her movements, they came to the conclusion that in a year the cook overcomes the distance separating her from the Congo. More rationally redesigning the kitchen and using the principle of the factory conveyor, they calculated that this distance can be reduced by an order of magnitude. In support of this scientific hypothesis, an appropriate schedule of movements was attached. Following it, the hostess significantly reduced its route, reaching only the Apennine Peninsula.
Continuing their research, restless Swedes in the early 1950s sent a group of observers to a remote area of Norway, which was dominated by bachelors. The commandees had to carefully monitor how the lonely men behave in the kitchen and study the “guinea pigs” in detail, watching them from specially made high chairs. Observers were allowed to come and go as they pleased, but under no circumstances were they allowed to talk to their owners.
Imagine that the Norwegians, whom the Swedes have a habit of regularly mocking, considering them to be brakes (as, for example, the Russians – Estonians), decided in response to mock their eastern neighbors on the peninsula, choosing the form of “kitchen stories”. They are somewhat close to Rogozhkin’s anecdotes about national peculiarities, but only more restrained and simple-minded, at least so much so that the story does not turn into a series of drunken and fat wit. Cinema Bent Hamer is a symbiosis of conceptual Jacques Tati, early Jim Jarmusch and sober Aki Kaurismäki.
Hamer ignored the temptation of global generalizations and consciously limited himself to the story of only two heroes - Swede Folke and Norwegian Izake. The evolution of their relationship is built on soft halftones - unobvious absurdity, views thrown stealthily or distorted, heavy sighs, prolonged silent pauses, and, ultimately, measured conversations for life. Behind all this, in the end, there is a certain higher meaning, that serpentine truth of life, which, alas, some of us do not have time to know, going into the other world uninitiated.
The reception of observation chosen by the director can be compared with a reality show, with the only difference that instead of a camera under the ceiling, a silent subject, armed with a notebook and a pencil, sits here on a high chair, with the help of which he plots the movement of the object from the garbage bucket to the sink or from table to stove. Each movement is not just a line, but a fateful vector, which, after careful processing by scientists, will allow you to build the most favorable location of cabinets, tables, chairs. And a bachelor instead of the conditional three thousand kilometers a year will pass only one and a half.
If in the middle of the last century, on the wave of universal socialization and faith in progress, satellites were launched into space, then modest Scandinavians were just trying to turn the kitchen into a mini-factory. What is not a reason for serious scientific research? What is not the basis for a crafty metaphor and intellectual hochm? However, Hamer does not allow himself any arrogance or snobbery on this occasion. Moreover, in fact, he performs an ironic hymn to the glory of sociability: a simple table conversation becomes the highest form of civilization and human existence.
It turns out that getting in touch with someone like yourself is as difficult as getting a woman in touch with a complex man. The main thing is to start. Here, it will be enough to use the master salt shaker once to establish communication. And this single exit abroad of alienation will lead to a whole series of violated prohibitions and put an end to the isolated existence in the bachelor kitchen of two unsociable marginals. As a result, the absurdist farce will turn into a lyrical drama about the meeting of two loneliness, which discovered the price of real male friendship.