Kamome shokudô

The plot may have the loose, humorous feel of an Aki Kaurismaki film - a compliment if there ever was one - but the style of KAMONE DINER is in many ways quite unique.

It is, basically, the story of a Japanese woman who decides to serve coffee and rice balls in Finland - and of the curious characters who walk into her life (and coffee shop). Dialog is in a mixture of Japanese and Finnish, but the visual style rich and vibrant; the use of Fuji film stock (the same type director Ozu used) gives the offers a balanced visual flavor with rich reds. The photography has a lovely sense of composition that makes each shot fascinating. After a while, the story builds a nostalgic sense of warmth and appreciation for cultural niceties - a realization that those small differences can mean a great deal, over time.

While Kaurismaki's plots seem to revolve around alcohol, KAMONE DINER is founded in caffeine and friendship. There aren't any "bad guys" to be found here, only a set of relationships based on small understandings. While one or two plot points may not make perfect sense, the basic illogic of setting a Japanese coffee shop in Finland is just strange enough to give this film an off-beat flavor that can be quite engaging. For many, drinking a bit of coffee might make the story go a little faster; I thought it was just fine the way it was.

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

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.

Although the two countries are located very far away from each other, there is a special link between Finland and Japan. After living in Finland for a few years, I have come to think of the Finns as the "Japanese of Europe" for their culture that seems alien to the rest of the West, a very reserved and homogeneous society that foreigners find nearly impossible to enter. In Japan, Finnish exports like the designers Ittala and Marimekko and the Moomins children's books have proved huge successes. The Japanese film KAMOME DINER celebrates this kinship by offering native audiences a fish-out-of-water film about Japanese women in Helsinki, but on universal themes that could appeal to viewers in Finland and beyond. The film is director Naoko Ogigami's adaptation of a novel by Yôko Mure.

As the film opens, we meet Sachie (Satomi Kobayashi), who has inexplicably decided to move from Japan to Finland and open a bare-bones eatery. That she has decided to serve rice balls (onigiri), a Japanese dish virtually unknown to the rest of the world, instead of the usual sushi or tempura only makes the premise all the more absurdist. After a month, she finally gets her first customer, but it is only a local fan of Japanese culture (Jarkko Niemi) who, by long tradition, gets his coffee for free everyday since he was its first patron, and he never brings any friends. When she meets with Midori (Hairi Katagiri), a Japanese woman who has just arrived in Finland and seems lost in life, Sachie decides to bring her on at the diner. They make an odd couple, these two, as as Sachie is petite and self-confident, while Midori is tall (gigantism tall) and awkward. Nevertheless, they gradually turn their restaurant into a success while discovering something of the Finnish society around them.

Any filmmaker taking on the subject of Finland is likely to pay homage to Aki Kaurismäki, Finland's most prominent filmmaker. Certainly the design of the diner, with its austerity, bleached pastel tones, and old-time decor is a typically Kaurismäkian touch. Some of the dry humor is also comparable to the the Finnish auteur, and a minor character is played by Markku Pelota, part of Kaurismäki stable. However, mainly this film lacks the bleakness or bitterness of Kaurismäki's work, and has a more straightforwardly heartwarming and cute ambiance.

As a Helsinki resident who knows the quirks of the culture and can recognize all of the shooting locations, I found this an occasionally amusing film, something worthwhile. However, it doesn't feel very deep, and it may be that its themes of female solidarity will prove accessible mainly to female viewers (author Yôko Mure has a mainly female readership in Japan). There is also the frustration that, in spite of the film's attempt to attract a female audience as well, some aspects of it must be based in references to Japanese culture that foreigners won't understand. For example, is Jarkko Niemi's character being lampooned as a typical Western "wapanese", or is the tension between him and Midori based on some other factor?

The English subtitles for the home-video release are high-quality, having been produced by a native English speaker. I speak Finnish and can confirm that the English subtitles mirror at least the Finnish dialogue reliably. I hope the same is true of the Japanese dialogue.

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.