Kamome Shokudo
If you don’t know the film and look up its Wikipedia article, you can probably guess where the PIFF went this year. In fact, we even visited the restaurant where “Kamome Shokudo” was filmed! Today, the restaurant makes hearty foods but its decor is also geared towards Japanese tourists who come for the film: You can still see “Kamome Shokudo” on the window right underneath the restaurant name like a subtitle, and it’s written in Japanese (exactly in the font the movie uses). Unsurprisingly, we saw a Japanese couple studying a Helsinki guidebook while eating. The restaurant itself is fantastic. Maybe the food is not haute cuisine, but we got lots for free (water, coffee, tea, milk and even homebrewed beer and a soup) in addition to decent prices (8-10 euro meal) to begin with, and the owners and employees are extraordinarily nice.
Just for that cute restaurant experience, it’s lucky that “Kamome Shokudo” exists. Other than that, the film is… odd. Just like all of the director’s films, it celebrates the quirkiness of its main characters to the point that it’s a little unrealistic. I guess I was not really into the philosophy of the film. I like the idea of her Japanese café in Helsinki, and I enjoyed seeing her fail in a lovely manner. But then she started talking about how Japanese food is the greatest in the world and the Finns must see that (which, in the end, they miraculously do!) and even though I thought the food looked very appetizing, I could not relate to that degree of food patriotism. In fact, I think that it borders on nationalism and find it somewhat dangerous to the ideal of understanding other cultures when people so strongly believe in the superiority of their own culture’s food.
Nevertheless, I liked the film’s wacky characters, and it was much fun to see all these touristic elements of Helsinki which we visited earlier on the same day we saw the film. It’s a very girlish movie (without being a chick flick). I would agree that its story is (despite the latent nationalism) very gentle and sweet, and I really liked how nothing much happened.
PS. It’s been 2 months since the PIFF, but life sure was busy. I want August to be the month where I get back on track with all these things I have been neglecting, including blogging.