Kitchen Stories features the most thoroughly Scandinavian theme of any movie ever made: it's a comedy about designing a more efficient kitchen. Tongue firmly in cheek, the basis of the film's humour is the obsessive worship of good design -- the kind of well-meant madness that leads IKEA employees to create a machine designed to simulate a 180-lb bottom squishing a seat cushion 50,000 times. The film opens with a fake instructional film created by scientists to illustrate the dangers of inefficient kitchen design; its earnest diagrams would not be out of place among the back pages of an IKEA catalogue.

However, in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, co-writer and director Bent Hamer is not entirely happy with being compared to the furniture superstore.

"I can see why people think of IKEA, I suppose. Though I don't think IKEA existed at this time," he says, with an air of disapproval. (Kitchen Stories is set in post-World War II Norway.) "Besides, IKEA is Swedish, you know."

And that is a crucial point for the Norwegian Hamer. Much of the humour of Kitchen Stories is of the delicate, ethnic variety, and Canadians may feel they're missing out on some crucial subtleties -- just imagine an Albertan telling Newfie jokes in Oslo. In the film, a Swedish home economist, Folke (Tomas Norström), is sent to observe the culinary habits of a mature Norwegian widower, Isak (Joachim Calmeyer), on his farm. Folke sets up an elevated chair -- not unlike a lifeguard's perch -- in the corner of Isak's kitchen, and prepares to record his movements. Isak has other ideas, however, and begins to observe his observer, until the two men begin a wary friendship.

While most Canadians probably mentally lump Norway and Sweden together as northern European countries with good social programs, Hamer goes into a long digression to explain the many differences between the two countries, and how Swedes are both more "bureaucratic" and "boring." (He sounds not unlike a Canadian patiently describing to a European how much cooler and nicer we are than Americans.) Norwegians also appear to have a slightly Canadian inferiority complex. "Probably like you and America, we have this 'Big Brother' complex with Sweden," says Hamer. "I grew up with Swedish radio, Swedish TV. As a child, I always gazed to Sweden to see what was coming -- they were always ahead of us."

In Kitchen Stories, it's the Swedes who are more technically advanced, but it's the Norwegians who have more heart, and Calmeyer's sly portrayal of a daft old coot becomes the focus of the film's humour and sympathy. On one level, it's a soft male-bonding story, like a version of The Odd Couple with less banter; on another, it's a more cerebral dissection of the principle that states a scientific observer cannot help affecting the subject being observed.

Hamer was inspired to create Kitchen Stories from actual research that went on in the 1950s, when faith in new technology ran high and there was a sense every job could and should be revolutionized by science.

"We saw old films of these kinds of research, which had developed some kind of electronic, magnetic way of measuring a housewife's trajectory around the kitchen," says Hamer. "In the post-war period, people were very interested in technical developments and remedies. In Norway, they had a train with a modern kitchen on it, that stopped in many places so people could see all the latest advances."

Much of Kitchen Stories is set in Isak's kitchen, but it avoids becoming static thanks to Hamer's elaborate imagination: it opens with a shot of dozens of candy-coloured trailers moving along a frozen highway, and the rest of the film displays a similarly rich visual wit. Folke, surveying the kitchen from his observing chair, is both in a position of authority and infantilized at the same time, like a baby in a high chair.

This kind of absurd imagery recalls another northern director, the Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki. When pressed about how Finland relates to the relationship between Sweden and Norway, Hamer waves away the question.

"The Finns -- they are completely different again," he says. "And I never know what they're thinking."