Kamome Diner

Some might call this simplistic, I would say efficient.

This is my first Ogigami Naoko movie, and it seems her films are known to be categorized as "healing" stories.. cultivating feelings of harmony and relaxation. So now I'll definitely search for what other entries I can find!

Anyway, while it seems to lack narrative depth, I can't help but think someone studying psychology would have a field-day with it, as if they studied a lot to come up with the core of it! Connecting with people, woes of life, belonging. Everyone has an effect on others.. showing the fact that just existing in a place leaves a mark. This is, of course, assisted by the peculiar cast of actors, the roles they play and how warm and inviting they are : Satomi Kobayashi's smile. Hairi Katagari's roughness. And Masako Motai, my favorite, portrays to perfection a lady that has worked properly her whole life and has no qualms with tackling something head on.

Some absurdity, and no straight-comedy, but still quite fun. It's very "soft" and would easily recommend it for a laid-back movie night.

I agree with the previous commenter, that on some level, this was an empty film. But I don't see this as a bad thing: the lack of content can be just as meaningful as the glut of it. Personally, I prefer emptiness: it leaves more room for your own thoughts.

But I wouldn't criticize this movie on its illogicalities (yes, that's a word - at least from now on): there's some very clear surrealist tendencies in the story, and it seems to me that surrealism and logic mix together just about as well as water and oil would.

All in all, I think this film is modest and well made, and even though it mightn't end up as an eternally bright beacon in the vast steppes of the cinematic arts, it sucker-punches the hell out of films that aim to be bigger and more important, but end up being useless fluff.

Great Film ! Very much influenced by Finnish Filmmaker Aki Kaurismaaki. Dry humor , still and slow story of A Japanese woman trying to make it in Helsinki , running her own Diner with Japanese food. Satomi Kobayashi plays an incredible role as the main character.definitely had me falling in love with her character. A good natured film about inter-human relations.A slow film about being nice towards each other.... a humoristic sketch of events in the life of the women and her 2 other Japanese helpers , running the Diner in downtown Helsinki. Though not packed with action , this film radiates a true sense of positive human interaction. Has me longing for other work by this young director !

The movie features a weak story-line but is quite unique in a way (desert humor and lazy screenplay). Something like the fact that music can bring people together, here the director displays that food can also bond people in a similar way. I did watch the movie having dinner which I recommend the viewers to do so. I've never been to Japan or known much about their food habits and so the 'rice balls' (which is mentioned as the soul-food in the movie) reminded me of the rice-balls I did have when I was young. Its made in southern part of India (mothers make a similar kind of rice-ball with fish/ vegetables inside and give it to kids except they don't cook after making one). The actors did a fine job. The acting of the Finnish boy was below average and was good the director didn't show him up close. Apart from these positives, the movie lacks logic. The events are pretty unreal and no money issue is dealt throughout and good characters throughout (something like a cartoon, everybody is nice to the other) that is not practical. The bottom line is that I liked the movie irrespective of its lack in logic for the director served it with the magic word "KOPI LUWAK".

Like the items from the menu of its titular establishment, "Kamome Diner" may be deceptively simple, yet within it is an amusing and sometimes hilarious contemplation on living in a foreign land, accompanied by droll performances and oozing sincerity so keen to please it would be churlish to fully dismiss. Naoki Ogigami's travelogue-slash-food show revels so much in its simplicity and oddity it's to the writer-director's credit that she succeeds on pulling it off with a material that sometimes border on sheer kink.

Sachie (Satomi Kobayashi) solely runs Kamome Diner (Ruokala Lokki), a restaurant in Helsinki she envisions catering to Finns looking for other than the typical Japanese fare -- a dream that, judging from the perpetually empty tables and chairs, is getting a cruel disappointment. Never getting more than curious stares from passersby, wheels of change start turning soon, however, with Sachie's first customer, an apparent Japanophile (Jarkko Niemi) whose eagerness to start up a small talk with her paves the way to meeting with Midori (Hairi Katagiri), a Japanese woman who is in Finland, as she explains in one of the film's most comical moments, by blind luck. Midori strikes a friendship with Sachie and helps in maintaining the diner, which gradually sees patrons trickle in even as Sachie develops a bond with some of the restaurant's customers.

Essentially a dissertation on the Maslowian hierarchy, Ogigami incrementally surrounds her characters with the core components for the survival of man (or woman, for that matter) by having them realize first the significance of basic necessities (the need to earn, the need for lodging, the need to find a lost luggage, etc) before they learn the value of peripheral essentials such as the camaraderie among themselves and the eventual self-actualization of Sachie as a restaurateur. The warm cinematography by Tuomo Virtanen lends a homey feel to the quaint diner -- a rather cramped but cozy place in the otherwise large but damp Finnish capital -- that furthers the empathetic kinship within its walls, a pleasing, if not perfect, marriage of the hospitable Japanese and the laid back Finn.