Scenes From The Big Chair
Posted on | January 29, 2008 at 11:04 pm | 3 Comments
What would you do if you had a man living in your kitchen, sitting up high in a big chair observing everything you were doing and forbidden to interact with you?
Well, that’s the plot of a movie that my girlfriend watched a few months ago called Kitchen Stories. After she watched it, she said that it was kind of out there but interesting and that I should watch it. When she described the above plot to me, I wasn’t sure if I should believe her. It came around again at the library, and she checked it out so I could watch it*, which I did tonight. She was right. It was not a very normal movie.
First of all, it’s Norwegian. It takes place in the 1950s. Scientific researchers from Sweden are tasked to study single Norwegian men in the kitchen, in order to understand how they use the kitchen. This is so that kitchens can be designed to be more efficient. There was an earlier study involving housewives that resulted in better utilization of the kitchen space, and then it was time to do the same thing for single males, who obviously utilize kitchens in a different way (at least in 50s’ Scandinavia). Volunteers got a little wooden horse and had to put up with a guy sitting in their kitchen day after day, watching them and taking notes from a vantage point on high. That was the weirdest thing about this movie – seeing the observer sitting in that high chair, looking down upon his subject. The observer is forbidden from interacting with the “host”, because that could change the results.
But, y’know, it’s really boring sitting up there in that chair day after day after day, unable to speak or interact. Our observer hero Folke is assigned to a cranky old farmer host named Isak, who didn’t really want to be cooperative in the first place. He thought he was getting a real horse to replace his sick one, instead of a toy horse. I couldn’t figure out just what it was that Isak farmed, except maybe snow. There was a lot of snow. In the beginning, Isak does everything he can to stymie Folke, including not even letting him in the house for the first several days. (Observers stay in a trailer next to the host’s house at night when they’re not observing.)
Inevitably, the system breaks down and Folke starts interacting with Isak, and the two bond. They are forced to hide their friendship from Folke’s stick-up-the-butt boss, who has already come down on a fellow observer who was caught drinking with his host. The two men form an unlikely friendship. Isak helps Folke when he’s sick by wrapping him in cat fur and making him sleep on top of the horse. Folke puts together a little birthday celebration for old Isak, stuffing him with cake and bourbon. Isak’s neighbor Grant gets jealous of Folke and kinda tries to kill him. Folke watches Isak take his monthly bath. It reminded me a lot of Brokeback Mountain without the gay parts and with even more snow and fewer women. There were no men under the age of 50 or women in this movie.
This is a sloooow movie, though luckily not very long. One of the cover blurbs for the movie declared it “hilarious!”. I’m not sure I’d go that far. I didn’t LOL once, although parts were kind of amusing in that “look at what the crazy frozen foreigners are doing” kind of way. And I think I laughed at the occasional jabs that the Norwegians made at the Swedish, which had something of an American/Canadian dynamic. But I have to admit it was somewhat touching and even charming, and by the end I did really care about what was going to happen to Folke and Isak and their friendship.
My take on the movie was that it was an indictment of reality TV. Do they have Big Brother in Norway?
They should remake this in Hollywood with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. Wait, I think they already did.
Sue, you should watch this movie with the subtitles off and tell me if it makes sense. Assuming you haven’t already seen it.
Latre.
* – Please note that I myself obey the RIAA and do not patronize libraries.
Comments
3 Responses to “Scenes From The Big Chair”
January 30th, 2008 @ 5:24 am
Wait, strange guys sitting in high chairs in your kitchen only happens in the MOVIES?
‘Scuse me, gotta run do something…
January 30th, 2008 @ 5:38 pm
“wrapping him in cat fur”: Flasshe, obviously Isak’s one of them there Scandinavian cat farmers.
January 31st, 2008 @ 10:15 am
I haven’t seen it but it sounds interesting — I’ll have to check it out!