Heftig og begeistret

Its a movie about life and life expectations in general from your point of view. Your point of view may be extremely different from whats portrayed in the movie, and thats excactly what makes this movie brilliant.

I saw this movie in central London. General age group of the audience was quite young, and I heard one say "wonderful film!" as they left, also they applauded. But some of the audience treated it as a bit of a freak show. They seemed to think these ugly, old people were hilarious, and laughed whenever they did anything slightly "embarrassing". Maybe this says more about English people than it does about the film or about Norwegian people! But I found something in the way the film was made that invited you to laugh, and not kindly. The choir members were encouraged to reveal themselves: their pasts, their sex lives, their naked bodies (in the bath). But sometimes the camera deliberately made them grotesque. Do they really sing outside during snowstorms? The performances you heard were certainly not recorded in snowstorms but in a hall, and dubbed on. Also sound effects like whistling wind were exaggerated, apparently for 'comic' effect. The English translations of the songs were laughable - deliberately? This film is not as innocent as it seems.

Saw this movie at the TIFF movie festival. Only time I've been...never went again. I'm afraid to ever see another movie like this.This movie is slow, boring and uninteresting...did I mention BORING!!! If your looking for a natural way to fall asleep at night, put on this movie and I'll guarantee you'll be out like a baby!

"Heftig og Begeistret" is a truly wonderful movie. Within the limits of a documentary, it says everything that could be said about life generally and life in the North of Norway especially. The singers in Berlevåg Mens-choir are the subject of the film, and we follow them for about a year, both when they sing, and when they are at home.

The beauty of having men standing next to the great ocean, singing songs unaffected of the weather (they are singing in rain, snow, storm and midnight sun), cannot be explained, it must be viewed. Further, there's the great amount of funny one-liner's these old guys present to us. (As the 96 years old man says about his bedroom: "This used to be a working room, now it's a museum.")

Then again, the movie shows how politics have separated the world, even at a small place like Berlevåg. During their tour to Murmansk, communists among the singers clash with the others, as the destroyed nature of the former Soviet Union comes to view. And it's a strong scene when one of the old communists burst into crying when he comes to a memorial place from WWII.

Perhaps the genius of the movie is the fact that anyone can recognize the people in the movie with someone you already know.

Like the choir from Finnmark, I had occasion to visit northern Russia during the summer of 2000. They were as astonished as I to find a very sharp contrast indeed between their settled, middle-class lives at home and the chaotic waste of Murmansk. Yet they connected, as did I, with an initially reluctant and sombre Russian people. Consider for a moment what a hellish past those souls have to live with, compared with life in a northern Scandinavian fishing village which, except for 1940-45, has been recently no more than a leisurely slide into economic oblivion.

Listening to the casual words of the old Norwegian gentlemen as they bare their own personal histories, one senses this film is more than a documentary. It succeeds in assessing life much as a novelist might, engaging in subtle character sketches against the spectacular backdrop of midnight sun, roaring sea, blizzards, and the stark, ever-present silhouette of Arctic sky. It was like listening to one of Garrison Keillor's tales of "Norwegian bachelor farmers" who are a mainstay of Minnesota folklore.

As a sidenote, I was amused to hear the choir sing a hymn that was, if memory serves correctly, penned by a distant cousin of mine from Iowa in 1857. Sung with different words and in Norwegian, of course. It began life as "The Little Brown Church in the Vale" and has evolved into something sung with exactly the same sense as a memory of a white church in Finnmark.

Crossing boundaries often results in noting that life is very much the same everywhere among common folk. Wherever you go, there you are.