Kamome shokudô

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.

The movie maintains a calm peacefulness throughout and is wholesome. The casting is perfect and the movie was a worthwhile delight.

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".

I have to agree with Shusei: This director isn't very concerned with cinema. The film doesn't speak to Japan's great cinematic history in any way. But the director is obviously very satisfied with herself. This film is emblematic of Japan's contemporary fetishism and myopia. It displays, unknowingly, a lot of the problems plaguing artistic and media discourses in Japan. There is a general sense of shallowness and lack of awareness that one notices if one is able to sit through this tripe. You get the Japanese constant and bizarre fascination with food, the lack of irony, the fetishization of and yet total disdain for and other-ing of all things "not Japanese," plus, you will observe the ghettoization and, again, fetishizing of a gender-group. This is very much a movie that is unselfconsciously and unwittingly by and for Japanese unmarried desexualized middle- aged "ladies" - a demographic distinction that is a kind of stigma created by the dysfunctions and pathologies of modern Japanese society. The film imagines that these Japanese "ladies" can escape their marginalization and branding in Japanese society while existing in a safe magical "foreign" world that is, obviously, anything but what life would be like if one moved and started a business in a foreign country. In this sense, the movie is both a product of and for masochistic Japanese propaganda.