Smala Sussie

Absolutely great movie. In the style of "Pulp Fiction" or "Trainspotting" (sort of). Very pulpy and alive. Hilarious full characters and wonderfuls plot development with plenty of hilarious lines and laughable twists and turns! RENT IT!! You won't be sorry.

When I see most movies I feel like I can figure out the plot within moments. I always have the feeling that I know what is going on next and I am usually right, but this movie was different. It kept me on my toes and had a great presentation ( original adaptation of an old standard). "Smala Susie" is definitely one of my new top ten movies of all time. I rented it and have bought it shortly afterwards!!

This film has a nervous energy that springs from the opening moment and doesn't stop until somewhere in the last third. Dazzling narrative technique, nearly always confusing you at the start of a scene, but somehow moving the story forward at the same time. The characters in the small village are wonderfully flexible - it's almost as if they change as the film's frenetic comedy and absurd plot demand. There is a sombre undertone as well, and it's that that makes some of the moments of resolution in the film somewhat awkward, as if the seriousness were being shoehorned into a farce. This will either infuriate or drive you into gales of exhausting laughter.

There have for the last decade been quite a lot of Swedish films about the Swedish world outside Stockholm. The stockholmers have had a lot to laugh about. Little is known here about how the smalltown Swedish inhabitants take that.

But "Smala Sussie" ("Slim Sussie" in English) is funny in more ways than being a hillbilly comedy. The acting by young Björn Starrin, Jonas Rimeika and Tuva Novotny is great. There might be a place for a discussion whether murder and using drugs really is a funny subject. Here it is so however, although everything is far from the Tarantino treatment.

But you have to be Swedish to appreciate this. Or maybe Scandinavian.

I don't know where to start. Acting? Dialogue? Characters? Great dead-pan acting. Excellent fast-and-funny-as-hell dialogue. Superb misfit-crazy-characters. This film's got it all. That it's spoken in the Swedish accent of Värmländska just makes a great film even better. In fact, don't waste your time reading this. Go down to your local rental and get it. Pronto!

Hint: you might like this movie a lot better if you're something of a movie buff. Tons of reference humor. The good sort. ;-)

I saw this movie a week or two ago at the Seattle intl film festival and it was one of my favorites.

The characters were all very funny in a clumsy and idiosyncratic sort of way. Much like a Coen bros. movie plot they are a bit too dumb and small-town-naive to pull off their objectives without screwing themselves up, but that's what makes it funny, right?

The dialog was great as well, with a few funny Tarantino-esqe side narratives. In fact, the screenplay also reminded me of Tarantino or Guy Ritchie films as it jumped around chronologically and repeated some of the story from different characters' perspectives.

I imagine if you like those directors (well, who doesn't?), you'd find this one very worth your while as well (although a bit less stylized and certainly less violent then most of Tarantino's work which I happen to think is a plus!)