Climate changes: `mostly Martha'. (Screen).

Mostly Martha, Sandra Nettelbeck's dourly comic look at life in an upscale restaurant in Hamburg, exploits a tantalizing oxymoron: German fine food. Truth be told, excellent German chefs run superb restaurant kitchens all over the world; nevertheless, think German food, and you think sauerkraut and wurst and schnitzel the size of a catcher's mitt. Haute cuisine is not a natural fit with German culture--even the word for it, Feinschmecker, sounds distinctly comical--and the film's conceit is that a German can do it only by a kind of superhuman and mechanical effort. The German chef represents a triumph of rigor over instinct. Break it down and follow the rules, is the idea; not the sensuality of food, but the science. Mostly Martha is the White Men Can't Jump of culinary life.

The second, related comic theme Nettelbeck has hold of is the endless German romance of Mediterranean cultures. Viewed from the North Sea, the Latin way of life glows with passion, color, relaxation, and erotic pleasure; it's the free and unencumbered life, without the burden of working hard and being serious and systematic--of being German, in other words. This theme runs wide and deep in German culture, and culinary work--part assembly line, part art--illuminates it nicely, affording, as it were, both a Teutonic and a Latin approach.

The film's exemplar of cheerless German perfectionism is Martha Klein (Martina Gedeck), a thirty something career woman who has found success as a sought-after chef, but at a steep personal cost. The film's opening scene finds her on her psychologist's couch, tonelessly reciting her recipe for braised pigeon in thyme sauce with truffles. We see him stifling a twinge of hunger, but Martha herself clearly finds no joy in food. In fact, she barely eats. At work, she sits reading a book amid the happy babble of the crew's pre-shift meal. She runs for the walk-in fridge to hide a panic attack, and later stomps out onto the restaurant floor to berate a customer for sending the foie gras back: "If you want liverwurst, go to a snack bar!" she explodes, then delivers a lecture on the exact procedure she used to prepare it. "Precision," she tells her therapist, "is the most important ingredient in the kitchen." Nettelbeck presents Martha as a helpless slave to her own obsession with order; even when serving a meal at home, she can't help correcting a slight error in her plating technique. When Americans depict therapy, it's all about our messed-up childhood; in Germany it's your messed-up national character, your terminal gloom and stress. Martha is a bad case. She's so high-strung you can hear her twanging.

What threatens to topple her altogether is the unexpected arrival of her eight-year-old niece, Lina, whose mother, Martha's sister, has been killed in an auto accident. Martha doesn't have room for the girl in her apartment or in her life, either. The girl's sadness and anxiety--her deep terror of living, expressed in a stubborn refusal to eat--parallel Martha's own, and it's more than Martha can handle. She lacks both the time and the emotional resources to be a mother to Lina, and the girl turns her every effort into failure. "I wish I had a recipe for you that I could follow," Martha says in a fit of frustration and despair.

The first half of Mostly Martha hardly feels or looks like a comedy. Nettelbeck and her photographer, Michael Bertl, affect a plain, almost severe style, with close shots that lend a claustrophobic feel, and a consistently muted color scheme. Martha's own pale face; the white of her chef's smock, the off-whites of her shrink's minimalist office and her own apartment; and Hamburg itself, snowy and frigid (there's more snow in this movie than usually hits Hamburg in an entire winter): add to all this a downbeat musical score and sparse dialogue suggesting vast emotional white spaces, and what you have is cold, cold, cold.

Then, into this wintry panorama springs the color and dash and noise of ... the Latin. Ah, bene, bene! Without telling her, Martha's boss hires an Italian sous chef, Mario. The new guy is a whiz with the saute pan, and what's more, he has fun doing it. He listens to silly music in the kitchen, dancing to Dean Martin's "Volare"--"how he savors the song," Mario shouts, "it's fantastic!" Unshaven, pathologically dilatory, rumpled, inspired, he's all unbridled passion and show. He's Italian, in other words. The anti-German.

Mario's arrival brings instant conflict. There's a confrontation in Martha's refrigerator refuge, and the humiliation of having him teach her how to make gnocchi. But we don't doubt for a second what's in store--namely, that Mario understands what's going on with Martha, and that he, and not her shrink, will provide the necessary soul cure. Through sly tactics and winning charm he gets Lina to eat (pasta, of course), and the little girl's return to life presages Martha's own. From here on, the film offers an up-tempo run of family scenes: Lina learning to cook under Mario's tutelage; Martha hyperventilating at the mess Mario makes of her kitchen; the three enjoying a meal on the living room floor, without a table or seats. We bounce along toward romance, the heretofore somber score now brightened by Louis Prima jazz vamps and the happy boogie of Paolo Conte's "Via Con Me," with its refrain of "It's wonderful, it's wonderful!"

Mostly Martha has its flaws. The sketchy plot involves Martha and Mario in an attempt to track down Lina's biological father, whom she has never met, and who turns out--Dickensian coincidence!--to be Italian. The ethnic archetypes are a bit overripe, to be sure, while the chef who has lost her taste (for food, for life) is already a hoary theme of foodie movies (the best being Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman). The lessons of this film--that there is no recipe for life, you just have to live it--are obvious. But Nettelback handles familiar material with a nice touch, aiming at loveliness rather than hilarity. So do the performances. Sergio Castellitto plays Mario with a sauntering confidence that stops just short of arrogance, his sunniness making the perfect comic balance to the furrow-browed, worried beauty of Martina Gedeck's Martha.

With a female protagonist using cross-cultural romance to add color and spice to her bland life, Mostly Martha resembles an upside-down-cake version of this year's box office giant-killer, My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Nettelbeck keeps the heat turned down instead of up, and as a result her film never quite caramelizes into sticky sweetness. The closing sequence juxtaposes Martha's final therapy session with a joyous banquet in Tuscany--an alfresco feast, Germans and Italians eating and laughing and making merry together at a big table beneath a grape arbor in the rolling countryside. Our American fascination with Italy involves having the time and money to go there, even perhaps to find that dream farmhouse (and write a book about it); but Germans dream of being Tuscan. Mostly Martha's German title, Bella Martha, isn't German at all, and conveys a level of fantasy absent from the English translation. Martha's healing isn't just going to Italy, but becoming Italian.

Non-German-speaking audiences may also miss a detail that sheds unintentional light on the limits of the film's own happy cross-cultural vision. When Lina's biological father finally shows up, he's played by an Italian actor who speaks German with a heavy Italian accent; Sergio Castellitto's Mario, however, is dubbed into German. (German film dubbing is very proficient, but look closely and you may be able to see it.) This may have been done because the filmmakers wanted Castellitto, and he couldn't speak German; but what's interesting is that the dubbed voice isn't that of an Italian speaking German, but rather a German affecting a slight Italian accent. The result is pure stylization, a kind of fantasy Italian--or rather, a German with Italian cachet. It's a revealing decision, as if to admit that the real sound of foreignness is too uncouth for a romantic lead, and suggests a German audience that will go only so far, and no further, in extending its sympathies to match its fantasies. This discrepancy leaves Mostly Martha tangled in irony. A psychologically healthy German, the film says, is a spiritual Italian--but an acceptable Italian is a romanticized German. In Germany as in so many other places, multicultural connection is the stuff of romance; the reality of otherness remains beyond the pale.