Kitchen

Aggie is attending a funeral. Her maternal grandmother has died, and she is the last remaining member of her family. She has decided to become a cook, a very successful one since her nose is very sensitive to fine aromas. At the funeral she meets a hairdresser, Louie, and his mother, Emma. They decide to take care of Aggie, and her new family and the refrigerator become the foundation of her existence.
She moves in with the hairdresser and his mother. Louie has a girlfriend, a real beauty, whom we get to see mostly from behind, undoubtedly for reasons of aesthetics. She, of course, becomes jealous that her boyfriend is living together with another girl.
Emma is actually Louie's biological father, who had a sex change operation when his son's mother died. Emma has
an admirer who becomes so humiliated, shocked and disgusted when he finds
out that ''she'' was once a man, that he kills her.
The film is set in a hypermodern city full of flowing colours, but without the violence we are used to in films from that part
of the world. All the young people in the film are dressed in the 80's spacesuit style, if you can remember how that looked. Colours are light and gay and exude
freedom, happiness, youth, and confidence. Perhaps one might feel that it borders on kitsch, but at the same time, the beautiful images are so well composed that the film's slow moving tempo actually turns out to be a big advantage, as we get a chance to really enjoy the visual beauty.
However, even if the image narration is calm and thoughtful, there is an engaging drive. It's like being in Asia and seeing
a Jeff Koons or a Japanese kitsch exhibition, without the erotic elements. The modern feel is promoted by the elements of mundane art in the film, ugly art, created using modern colours that appear in unexpected combinations. Yet at the same time it is postmodern in the extreme. The Japanese flavour can be explained by the fact that the film is in part Japanese and is based on a Japanese novel from 1988 by Banana Yoshimoto.
Helena Hederberg

Premiärstatus
Nordisk premiär: Orig. titel
Ngo oi Chuifong: Medverkande
Jordan Chan, Yasuko Tomita,Law Kar Ying: Producent
Raymond Chow,Yokiehi Osato: Manus
Yim Ho: Foto
Poon Hang Sang: Musik
Otomo Yoshihide: Talat språk
Cantonese with Chinese/English subtitles