Based on a Banana Yoshimoto novel, Kitchen is a slow-burning love story. Profoundly meditated, with a meticulously controlled rhythm and an intense clarity in images, it draws the audience into the worlds of its three protagonists: Louie, a hairdresser; Emma, his transsexual mother/biological father; and Aggie, a young woman who can smell rain. When Aggie loses her grandmother and is grief-stricken, Louie and Emma take her under their wings. Eventually the young people start out to discover the world's romantic possibilities, while Emma, mid-course in the strange heaviness of adult life finds out love guarantees no happiness. Yim Ho, making lyric sense of the emotion of longing, creates a film to be savoured like a poem. Study the details, for every scene is an event.