Fra balkongen

Why? Why was this made? Its a weird one this. No clear narrative, no structure. The only thing that ties the film together is Ole Gievers banal and insisting voice-over that continues throughout the film. This is not a film. Its an essay accompanied by random photos. Half the film could have been a slightly interesting essay on life (although Gievers conclusion on life and its meaning is utter banal). The other half looks like a badly made TV documentary from the 80s.

Why does he keep getting funds to make movies? He has no cinematic skills. I always leave his films wondering why they where made. Because most of them would work better as a text. There are many visual talents in Norway. Give them a chance. And give this guy a pen and a publisher.

Filmmaker Ole Giæver (Mot naturen) offers his musings on life and some personal philosophy accompanied by hi-res home videos of his family of four. It's an unusual format, arguably for a reason, but it's not the format that makes Fra balkongen a rather excruciating and mostly unrewarding experience - it's the slightness of Giæver's observations and the film's underwhelming visuals and compositions. Revisiting date-stamped VHS home videos from the early 1990s might have some sort of obscure anthropological value, but hardly for the audience of this movie. If nothing else, the picture is well aware of its smallness - it positively basks in it - but the glimpses of artistic value are too few and far between to make it all worthwhile. Most of them pop up when Giæver takes a broader perspective and ponders the universe and his place in it. But when he tries to weave his own everyday routines into it all in essayistic fashion, he reveals little else than his own trite ambition. Alas, Giæver is no Knausgård. And he is no visualist either. There's a sense of uninspiring triviality to the many universal but often banal truths he presents here.