Kamome Diner

“It’s a diner, not a restaurant”: the line with which the Japanese Sachie, cook and manager, sets the record straight with her employee — and also with the hungry viewer. All eager, no doubt, to gorge on a banquet-film, culinary porn seasoned in the spirit of La Passion de Dodin Bouffant (2023, Tran Anh Hung) or Babette’s Feast (1987, Gabriel Axel). Then they’d better stash the bib and tighten their belt! Director Naoko Ogigami's proposal is, in every way, the negative image of these examples: in the stripped-down presentation of the snacks, in the outright rejection of melodrama, in the way she empties the plot of any definitive moral (and is “plot” the right word?).

Gluttony does not even show its ugly face: it simply does not occur to any of the characters. Perhaps because they follow Sachie's lead, as if she were a conductor of scattered lives, arranging them in a minimalist score. Without manipulation, from the café she opens in Helsinki (Ruokala Lokki), she magnetizes the people around her. Or, to end this metaphorical gibberish and return to gastronomic vocabulary, she is the sieve that filters the lumps of people. Except for the gourmands, her compatriots who are homesick, the Finns who reduce Japan to sushi and sake: Sachie says this to her assistant Midori, both in their pajamas, lying on a mat, after a dizzy squat and a precarious yoga pose. She just wants to serve passersby, those who happen to drop by.

She is committed to chance: she takes it seriously, never compromising on diligence, much less humor. And only chance explains her carousel of oddballs, customers or not, starting with the tourist Midori: she closed her eyes, pointed her finger at a world map, and ended up in Finland. A cartoonish figure, with bulging eyes, stoic and somewhat neurotic, she is the one Sachie turns to recall the Gatchaman opening theme, a classic anime. A theme disenchanted by Tommi, a young Japanophile, the café's unofficial mascot. Did he offer to pay for any of the thousand coffees he ordered? Does he have any other concern than learning Japanese? We will never know. We sense, however, that he has sworn allegiance to this small universe when he comes to the aid of the fifty-something woman sprawled on the floor of the diner, carrying her home on his back after too many shots of Koskenkorva. The sensible Masako, adrift in Helsinki while waiting to recover her suitcase, completes the gallery of characters destined for the threshold of Ruokala Lokki, suspicious until they cross it.

Although the space is an icebreaker, it is filmed without much curiosity, a stage for action like any other (similar to the blasé gaze with which Mike Leigh treated the Regret Rien [sic] restaurant in Life Is Sweet in 1990). But its power is not contained within four walls: it is something like a resident spirit with an itinerant superpower, tasked with protecting its community. In that episode drenched in koskenkorva, the Nordic blond Tommi does not take care of the injured woman alone: he goes on a pilgrimage with the entire diner crew. Ruokala Lokki dematerializes, transcending the immaculate furniture; it is the point that reaches out. It jumps the fence to offer a friendly shoulder to a vulnerable customer, when it could just foist alcohol on her.

Kamome's sublimated comedy does not imply Wes Anderson's aesthetic rigor, despite a certain surrealist ballast that links it to The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). Naoko Ogigami is looser, without ever completely falling apart. This is evident in a genre that tends to reward the viewer with full access to the cast's dirty secrets: here, we only have Sachie's knowing smile, pragmatic and without malice, and a brief narration about seagulls and mourning. What has she experienced as an immigrant in Europe? We can draw conclusions from her exchange of glances with the three gossiping old ladies through the café window. And what kind of friend is she? “When the world ends, make sure you invite me,” says Midori with rare tenderness. “Your reservation is confirmed,” replies Sachie in a brief flash of light, without needing to gush with thanks or hugs. And what is her relationship with food, after all?

Ignore the glimpses of seared salmon and sizzling soy-glazed ribs; onigiri is the taste and palette of this film. In other words, Sachie's signature dish is a rice ball: not very evocative or exciting, is it? And apparently as salvific as Ari Kaurismäki's sad boiled potatoes accompanying a can of sardines in The Other Side of Hope (2017)... Wrong! The protagonist explains herself, and we finally determine the filmic-gustatory family to which Kamome Diner belongs: that of Big Night (1996, Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci) and Comezainas (2022, Mafalda Salgueiro). Cooking as a tribute to the family: in Sachie's case, to her father, who took the place of her deceased mother, preparing salmon, plum, and tuna onigiri for her. “They were huge and awkward. But they were delicious.” This applies to the rice balls, but also to all the friends she gathered at her diner.