We are in the 50s. In a remote village in Norway come from neighboring Sweden, a group of researchers appointed by the government of their country to carry out a sociological survey. Purpose of the study is the behavior of people in the space of your kitchen, their movements, their habits, their customs. Backed by a similar experience over Sweden, must now compare it with the behavior of this Norwegian town inhabited only by single men.
The Norwegian director Bent Hamer, she says, is actually from a study done in Sweden by Swedish scholars at the Institute for Research Domestica. The aim was to optimize the movements of housewives in the kitchen, whose movements were reported in a diagram we see reproduced in the film, in order to ensure that the Swedish home "instead of walking the equivalent of a trip from Sweden to Congo could only walk the distance of a journey to the north of Italy. "
Folke (Tomas Norstrom) is one of the technicians hired to conduct the surveys. It is installed in the home of Isak. (Joachim Calmeyer, one of the greatest players in Norwegian), perched on a high chair umpire tennis, from which observed and recorded every movement of his landlord. With a slow rate, and the almost total absence of dialogue, Hamer tells us about the developments of relations between the two men, initially marked by mistrust and then land, deepening mutual understanding, friendship and a warm solidarity.
is a story of loneliness, the one told by the Norwegian director, cold as the snow around the shack of Isak. But the film, which is to praise the careful reconstruction of environments, it is also a criticism of the alleged infallibility of "positivism" that animated, and soul, the sociological investigations of this type. System, however, is right in ' "Humanity" of the operator its own fallibility. The roles are likely to be reversed, and this is what happens in the film when the viewer begins to feel observed in a subtle game of "who observes people."
Beyond the artistic value of films, however well-shot and nice use, it is interesting epistemological reflection that the film offers:
detached observation is used (represented in the film by the chair on which sits the observer Folke) of ethological type to learn human behavior? The response of the film seems to be entirely negative. There is the problem of interference of the observer which is represented by the continuous escape of Isak's observation Folke. Indeed, there is a paradoxical reversal: Isak will practice in fact a hole in the ceiling just above Folke and will study the behavior. The absurd and surreal will melt when, from any exchange of objects (the launch of the pipe tobacco of folk Isac ran out), it will create a human relationship ever closer links between the two. A phrase emblematic of Isak has a key of the film: "You can not know unless you communicate."
short, it is as if we affirm the validity of participant's anthropology on that type of "positivity" from animals in the laboratory. The cool detachment gives way to a human relationship between two solitudes, that of empathy and warmth that folk will celebrate the birthday of Isak, bringing him a cake with many candles. The circle closes when the death of Isak, Folke will live in his house. It's a little 'anthropologist the risk that rising to the top of another culture, may end up not going back.
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