Noi l'albinos

Noi is a tragicomic tale of a young man who is too bright to be stuck in the dismal life he was given, but not creative enough or tenacious enough to find a way out. He refuses to play by the rules, but has not figured out anything else that he can do or be. He has minor escapes, via a ViewMaster, books, a girlfriend from the city, a gun to shoot icicles with, but they are not ultimately enough to keep him from going berserk. But the tiny Icelandic village where he lives understands him, and refuses to do something so simple as to have him locked up or sent away. Rather, they just understand, and Noi cannot get out of his dreary cold existence.

The role of Noi is played by a skinny young man who looks like he's had chemo, but he's got a beautiful expressive face, which is on-screen almost all the time. I'd love to see the guy with a head of hair. His grandmother provides great comic relief as she does her aerobics, and his dad is a vivid character down on his luck in a way that only Scandinavians can portray. He's drunk on Elvis, and that makes his life bearable.

Hope this movies gets releases--it's beautiful to look at, funny, sad, touching.

Easily the most interesting and beautiful debut film of these last few years, with "Tan de repente" and "Verboden te zuchten" ; explicitly placed under the care of Kierkegaard ("if you hang yourself, you'll regret it, if you don't hang yourself, you'll regret it too"), Nói is as full of humour as it is desperate (with the exception of "love and getting away", Nói doesn't take anything seriously ; he's constantly playing : to avoid being sucked in by that seemingly absurd adult world which takes itself so seriously ; he dreams of escaping to Hawaii, looking at slides with a cheap viewing-box his mother just gave him for his birthday ; in this minimum world, everything is cheap...)… Frightful feelings of isolation and desolation, of being trapped on one hand ; but on the other hand, as absurdly funny (the parish-priest and Nói haggling over the depth of the tomb he has to dig in the cemetery ! and in Danish, Kierkegaard is the word for cemetery...) as it is anguishingly claustrophobic (Nói trapped, this time literally, in his secret cellar after the avalanche -- probably an allegory of his ever-increasing isolation)…

Filmed with Tarkovskian beauty (a permanent blue cast, at once gloomy, serene and unsettling ; blue maybe because it is the exaggeration, the saturation of white, the white of frost, the white of snow), it could be seen as the fateful tale (told more in images than in words) of a village "idiot" (in the Dostoievskian sense), or a "Stalker", as hemmed-in by (rather nice) people as the village is hemmed-in by (desperately beautiful) nature, doomed for absolute aloneness, into which, starting from mere difference and marginality (the "albino" bit), he will gradually "descend" (taking refuge regularly in that cellar being just another allegory of this) ; a journey to the end of the cold… tragic, but perhaps liberating… even if we can't, whatever we do, escape "fate" (the local fortune teller had rightly seen only "death and desolation" in store for Nói)… Starting rather realistically, the film gets more allegorical as it unravels (the avalanche turns out to have killed a mere 10 people : all those Nói had some contact with, and only those) ; in the last but one image, facing us, looking into his viewing-box, Nói looks like a robot, or a spaceman with his helmet on ; as for the very last image (the "real" view of one of the Hawaiian slides he used to look at : a beach of white sand, palm trees, and the gentle waves of a turquoise sea), it will probably be given as many interpretations as there will be viewers ; it proves once more that images, like words, don't have meaning(s) in themselves, but only relatively to the context into which they come inserted : here, the corniest touristic cliché becomes a thing of many meanings, an unfathomable mystery…

Like Aki Kaurismaki's "Match factory girl", in many ways a fairy tale in reverse...

In the spare and poetic "Noi the Albino," the title character is a seventeen-year-old gifted underachiever who lives with his grandmother in a dreary little village on the coast of northern Iceland. This would be a harsh, isolated environment for anyone to grow up in, but it is particularly trying for a misfit adolescent with few social skills and no real hope for the future. Noi, whose generally aloof, alcoholic father lives on his own in a different part of town, spends most of his time trudging purposelessly through the snowy streets of the village or holing up in the basement room he's carved out for himself as a kind of sanctuary from a world too utterly depressing to contemplate. Bored by school and bereft of friends, this young man drifts through life, dreaming of the day when he will be able to live on a very different kind of island in the South Seas, a location light years removed from this place where the interiors are every bit as stark and forbidding as the white-on-white world outside.

"Noi the Albino" is one of those films in which the very lack of anything significant happening becomes the central theme and message of the work. Noi lives a life that is so uneventful and boring that it would drive virtually any one of us to the brink of madness. We hardly blame him when we see him dozing through his classes at school or pilfering change from a mock slot machine set up in the local restaurant. Yet, despite the fact that virtually nothing of consequence happens, the film itself is a fascinating mood piece that seeps into our bones and makes us sympathize with the plight of the strange young man who occupies center stage in the drama. Most of the adults in Noi's life seem to sense his potential, but, for some reason, he is totally unwilling to tap into it. What's impressive about the film is that it doesn't try to explain why that is, though we sense it has something to do with the stifling environment in which he lives. Noi becomes emblematic of all people who lead lives of quiet desperation, tucked away in remote, virtually uninhabitable corners of the globe, far removed from the bustle and excitement that can be found only in places with large and diverse populations.

As Noi, Tomas Lemarquis gives a beautiful, subtle performance, creating a compelling and complex character using little more than body language and facial expressions. The final moments of the film are truly heartbreaking as Noi learns the value of what he has - even though, at that point, the realization comes too late.

Written and directed by Dagur Kari with an artist's eye for lyricism and austerity, this is a bleak but intriguing little film that will stay in your mind long past the closing credits.

Take an alienated, bald, Albino teenager named Nói (Tómas Lemarquis) in the frozen fjord of northern Iceland and blend together an estranged ineffectual father while a grandmother who does not say much is raising him and the story is destined to be tragic and dark. Although Nói is well intentioned, he lacks motivation and is prone to having spells of exceptional bad luck. He is disruptive at school if he bothers to show up at all. Ultimately he is expelled and his alcoholic dad finds Nói a job working for a priest in a graveyard. As the scenario unfolds, he woos another somber and beautiful teen named Iris (Elin Hansdóttir), who works as a gas station attendant and café clerk. His relationship to Iris appears to be the only thing going well in Nói 's life; still it is just a fragile illusion.

It is winter in Iceland, such that the fjord is cut off from the outside world, while surrounded by an ominous mountain, and buried under a shroud of snow. Beautiful shots of glaciers and chilly seasides allow the tedium of this desolation to be a lot more tolerable. If you have ever been in a dead town out in the boonies somewhere, this one is even more comatose by comparison. It is hardly surprising that everyone is so somber and alienated from one another during the dark three-hour days of winter.

Please remember that this is not simply another typical bored teenager film--underneath it all Nói seems to have real promise, although his motivation is virtually non-existent. The walls of snow and ice surrounding his village give the illusion of a natural prison. Nói's desperate plans to break out fail miserably during a ludicrous failed bank robbery and an aborted car theft, further adding to his despair.

The movie directed by Dagur Kári is largely bleak and sometimes slow moving, yet it is temperamental, seductive, and distinctive. There are no cheap thrills, sexy scenes, car crashes, or violence, however the cinematography and the unfolding human drama draw you in like bees to honey and hold you there to it's amazing finish. It is not until a natural disaster so totally shatter Nói's universe that the film begins to offer the hope of a new beginning for Nói.

Nói is completely believable for anyone who ever recalls being a teenager. He is the embodiment of a disturbing reflection of the aspirations, naivety and unmanageable emotions many teens feel at that age. This film kept me enthralled and touched in equal measures right down to its startling climax. This movie is a must see for anyone who appreciates that life is different when you are just 17.

Although distant in time and space, this work is reminiscent of post-WW2 Italian neorealism, with a sprinkle of dry Nordic humour. The grandiose setting of Iceland's north-western fjord region is the real protagonist: that huge white cone-shaped mountain looms in the background, very similar to Dante's Purgatory mount, meting out penance and confining the souls living within its shadow. The actors - like in neorealistic movies - seem (but aren't) taken from the street, they look completely natural, they have jobs and behave like real people. The title character is amazingly expressive, despite his shaved head and eyebrows. With a fractional movement of the eyes and mouth he moves us to tears or laughter. The dialogues are scanty, but the continuity makes it all very clear: Noi is a child prodigy, who is tied to an inescapable, remote environment. He is at variance with his teachers, but loves - and is loved by - his disjoint family. He dreams of escaping to an entirely different world, a world of sunny beaches and palm trees, taking along the girl he is infatuated with. But deep down he knows his dream is doomed: there is no escape from his icy ghetto - almost.