Writer-director Sandra Nettelbeck begins Mostly Martha by introducing a determinedly single person. She rolls her opening credits over fetishized shots of food preparation, later introduces a wide-eyed orphan, and finally throws in a fast-talking, life-affirming Italian man. Except for kung fu and Pablo Neruda, she scarcely omits a single element from the past decade's worth of financially successful foreign-language films. In the end, those elements combine exactly as expected, but Mostly Martha at least takes a different approach to the process of combining them. Chalk it up to restraint on Nettelbeck's part, or perhaps the not-so-legendary German command of whimsy, but the film thankfully passes up every opportunity to indulge in cuteness. Playing a character frightfully close to Phil Hartman's Anal-Retentive Chef, Martina Gedeck stars as the culinary mind behind one of Hamburg's best restaurants, a woman who takes a customer complaint as a personal insult and who scorches flan with a degree of care usually associated with nitroglycerine couriers. Her life is already precariously balanced, and it starts to tip out of control after her sister's death leaves her in charge of her young niece (Maxime Foerste). Meanwhile, back at the restaurant, she fears she faces competition when her boss brings in Italian sous-chef Sergio Castellitto to pick up the slack created by Gedeck's new responsibilities. Tension, sexual and otherwise, follows, but Nettelbeck's avoidance of the obvious keeps Mostly Martha afloat, at least for a while. Eventually, Foerste does manifest as the catalyst that allows Gedeck to become a better, less self-centered person. But mostly, Foerste just acts like a troubled kid, with wild mood swings, constant demands, and a tendency to sidetrack Gedeck's attempts to have a life not fully devoted to caring for her. Similarly, Castellitto makes his character a person first and the embodiment of la dolce vita second. In keeping with her performers' subtlety, Nettelbeck remains low-key in depicting the contrasts between the Mediterranean and the Germanic. She lets those cultures echo the chaos of the kitchen and the quiet of the dining room, and she's so good at it that it's a shame when the necessities of plot kick in, and Mostly Martha becomes precisely the sort of film its elements demand. As tearful goodbyes and joyful montage sequences set to lite-jazz saxophoning take over, "neatly winsome" trumps "messy drama" yet again.