Sunday, May 19, 2002		Article

WHAT is Norwegian cinema like? Except for rare International Film Festival of India (IFFI) screenings we in India are hardly exposed to it. Is it as cold as the country? Not really. May be the cold makes them more industrious but they have social and emotional problems like us and the recent Norwegian film festival provided us with an insight into their way of life.

Karin Julsurd’s Bloody Angels is easily the best of the four films I saw, an off-beat thriller about murder and its detection in a small town and a tightly-knit community. Six months ago a retarded 13-year-old girl was raped and murdered. Now there has been another death — one of two brothers the village suspects of that girl’s murder, is found drowned.

Enter, police investigator Nicholas Ramm from Oslo. How does he fit into this rather closed society? He may forge an understanding with the drowned boy’s brother Niklas. But what about the rest of the town? This is what Bloody Angels is all about and director Julsurd weaves an intricate tapestry of intrigue that can only blossom in the insularity of a small town where superstition and religion play a big part. For a first-film Julsurd’s handling of the subject is adept.

There are red herrings but it is the path traversed by Ramm that makes for engrossing drama. Could it be a conspiracy? Because everyone considers Ramm an outsider. And what about the drowned boy’s parents? Art lies in concealing art, they say, and this story builds up to an amazing climax. The pace may not be hot but at no time is it uninteresting. It is a clear case of good cinema as is Thomas Robsahm’s The Greatest Thing which deals with female camaraderie but is somewhat contrived.

Petra is a young woman forced to leave her small town because of her many love affairs. She lands up at a vicarage in Copenhagen where a widowed Danish priest finds her a good companion to his daughter Signe. That Petra and Signe get along like a house on fire is obvious but the unpredictable Petra has more secrets hidden in her closet. Director Robsham’s handling of the subject is somewhat lackadaisical and though credibility at times suffers, the film holds its own and the ending is somewhat unexpected and shows the other side of this impetuous girl who finally seems to have found her vocation in life. It is the strong narrative that is the film’s greatest asset.

Mona Hoel’s Cabin Fever is a bitter-sweet story of a family get-together in a cabin in the mountains. The provocation is Christmas. Relatives from far and wide, including Poland, make their way to this wilderness. The physical closeness becomes too much. The children, now grown up, have to come to terms with the alcoholism of the father. Raw nerves are exposed and tempers are frayed, a happy occasion becomes anything but happy and tragedy seems to be lurking around the corner. If it is capturing the different nuances of human nature, director Hoel does so admirably but may she could have churned out a more composite story. Still, for all its shortcomings Cabin Fever is better than Frozen Heart by Stig Andersen and Kenny Sanders.

Frozen Heart is about the adventures of the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen and brings to light the egomaniacal side of this man, his secret loves and the sad end he comes to because of his infinite ego. The best part of the film is the archival footage of Amundsen in the snow-bound polar regions. He was the first to sail through the Northwest Passage (1903-1906) and the first to conquer the South Pole (1911). His treatment of two Eskimo girls he adopted, by sending them to Siberia, was as trite as his infatuation with Kiss Bennett was the opposite. No, one is in any way contesting Amundsen’s behaviour but the commentary, almost non-stop, is annoying with Amundsen’s name repeated more than 150 times. Surely, one can’t get away with such blunders these days.