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Distant
& Kitchen Stories
LIAM LACEY, Globe and Mail (Canada), 25 March 2004
Distant
Directed and written by: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Starring: Muzaffer Ozdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak
Classification: PG
Rating:* * * ˝
Kitchen Stories
Directed by: Bent Hamer
Written by: Bent Hamer and Jorgen Bergmak
Starring Tomas Norstrom and Joachim Calmeyer
Classification: PG
Rating: * * *
Emotional reticence, home surveillance and obnoxious roommates are the
themes this week in a pair of foreign-language lonely-guy movies.
Kitchen Stories, set in Norway of the early 1950s, is a comedy, albeit
of the Scandinavian deadpan variety, with a chuckle beneath a solemn exterior.
Distant, set in contemporary Istanbul, is a doleful Turkish masterpiece
which won major awards at Cannes (Grand Prize and a shared best-acting
award for its stars) and is glum to the bone.
Distant is a wintry tale of two men who can't see how much they need each
other's company. It's an austere affair, devoid of a musical score, with
little dialogue and long stretches of silence. The emotional resonance
is provided by the ambient sound — from the crunch of snow boots on cold
ground, to the lonely tinkle of wind chimes.
Director Nuri Bilge ( Clouds of May) also wrote, shot, edited and produced
Distant, his fourth film, and the first set in the city. A variation on
the children's story of the city and country mouse, it begins on the mountain
road where Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak), who has just lost his job at a
factory, is hitchhiking to the city to visit his cousin and try to find
work.
Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir) is a photographer in his forties, and things
aren't going well for him either. The first time we see him he's sexually
impotent with a woman (she is seen out of focus, sitting half-dressed
on a daybed, one foot bouncing up and down impatiently.)
Though he once dreamed of becoming a film director like Andrei Tarkovsky,
he makes a living taking pictures of tiles for a ceramics factory. The
rest of the time he eats alone in restaurants, mopes, listens to phone
messages and channel surfs on his flat-screen television.
When Yusuf shows up at Mahmut's apartment, he asks if he can stay for
a few days before getting a job on a ship. Mahmut reluctantly agrees and
when no job pans out, Yusuf overstays his welcome.
Pretending to follow employment leads, Yusuf spends his days on the streets,
in cafés and bars, or stalking a pretty neighbourhood woman through Istanbul.
With its record shops, yuppie restaurants and vacant winter waterfront,
Istanbul is depicted as a city as sterile and anonymous as any Western
metropolis.
Days turn to weeks, and the only measure of time passing is the changing
state of Mahmut's facial hair from scene to scene. After a couple of excursions
together out of the cramped apartment, tensions start to rise. Mahmut
begins to loathe his cousin, berating him for everything from failing
to flush the toilet to the smell of his cheap cigarettes.
The emotional crisis comes when Mahmut instructs his cousin to dispose
of a pesky mouse, found piteously squeaking, stuck to a sticky tape trap.
Throughout, Ceylan's observant camera merely waits and watches, staring
down an empty corridor until a character appears, or peers into a room
from a bar doorway, past the slumped shoulders of the patrons.
Because we follow both of their stories, we know the two cousins share
more than they recognize — the same anxieties about sick mothers and their
desire for the love of a woman. Just as Yusuf follows his pretty neighbour,
Mahmut spies on his former wife. But here, misery despises company and
the space between the two men proves unbridgeable. By the end, Mahmut
is alone again, sitting on a bench by the sea and staring at the rolling
water and passing ships, holding his roommate's crumpled cigarette package.
In comparison with Ceylan's artful downer of a film, the dryly absurdist
Kitchen Stories, from Norwegian director Bent Hamer, feels like a romp.
Set against the background of optimistic Swedish social sciences of the
1950s, the film centres on the Home Research Institute, a government body
that is trying to improve kitchen efficiency for Swedish housewives.
To do so, the Institute believes it must become familiar with the kitchen
habits of Norwegian bachelors. Eighteen scientists are sent to a remote
village in Norway, looking like invaders in a science-fiction B-flick
towing their identical egg-shaped trailers (very orderly until they have
to switch to the opposite side of the road for driving in Norway). They
have come to observe the bachelors in their natural habitat.
The scientists are not supposed to talk, or in any other way interact
with their subjects, which leads to cultural clashes ("You were neutral
in the war, too" notes one of the Norwegian subjects) and Buster
Keaton-worthy sight gags.
The story zeroes in on the timid scientist Folke (Tomas Norstrom), who
finds himself sitting like a lifeguard on a chair atop a ladder in the
corner of a kitchen, while Isak, a curmudgeonly bachelor farmer, glares
at him.
Annoyed by his observer's presence, Isak takes his meals up to the attic
— and then drills a hole in the floor so he can observe his observer:
After a stretch of such game playing, things start warming up between
the two middle-aged bachelors.
It begins with sharing coffee in the morning and before you know it, Isak
is letting Folke listen to the radio stations he can pick up from his
fillings in his teeth. Among Isak's other talking points, he plays the
saw as a musical instrument and has a room filled with contraband pepper.
No wonder the Swede is charmed.
By the time the scientist buys his subject a birthday cake and gets drunk
with him, he's in serious breach of his contract.
Rather than simply beating the dead horse of utopian socialist engineering
plans, Kitchen Stories serves to champion human irrepressibility and unpredictability.
It's the flip side to the defeatism of Distant, but with parallels, both
in the very deliberate pacing and moments of visual wit. There's even
a mouse-trapping incident in Kitchen Stories when Folke's delicate cough
causes a trap to snap on Isak's fingers — that's used as early illustration
of the impossibility of the non-intrusive observer.
"How can we understand each other if we don't communicate?"
the puzzled farmer asks his scientist guest. Distant makes the same enquiry
as a strangled cry of despair. In Kitchen Stories, it's more of a rhetorical
common-sense question.
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