Noi l'albinos

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.

If you want to learn how to make mayonnaise while learning French, how to smoke, how to destroy a piano with an axe, how not to rob a bank, and how to survive in an environment of mind-numbing boredom, Dagur Kari's first feature Noi Albinoi may be the key. Noi is a coming-of-age comedy/drama with a morbidly deadpan sense of humor, but it is also a film that tackles a very serious subject, the physical and emotional isolation of bright teenagers growing up in an environment that does not nurture them. Set in Bolungarvik (pop. 957) in Iceland's Western Fjords, the stark quality of the remote village sheltered between the seacoast and the frozen mountains has a bluish glow that makes the world seem ominous and the relentless quiet of the secret snow conveys a tone of oppressive solitude.

This is the environment a gangling 17-year old named Noi must face each day. He is a notorious underachiever whose routine consists of avoiding school and trying please his alcoholic father Kiddi (Throstur Leo Gunnarsson). Convincingly portrayed by Icelandic actor Tomas Lemarquis, Noi is an enigma. With his shaved head, pallid complexion, and intense eyes, it is hard to know if he is an albino or a devotee of Hari Krishna. We first meet Noi in his bed as his grandmother (Anna Fridriksdóttir) tries to wake him up for school by firing a rifle over his head. Though he is considered by the school psychiatrist to be exceptionally intelligent, Noi is not fond of school and makes his teachers crazy with his lack of punctuality, sleeping in class, and general uncaring manner.

When he goes too far by placing a tape recorder on his seat to record the lecture while he goes home, his expulsion from school is the predictable result. Feeling trapped, Noi retreats to the basement of his grandmother's house where he can think about an exotic destination to escape to, made more real when his grandmother gives him a stereopticon to view pictures of a land of beaches and palm trees. His interest in life picks up when Iris (Elín Hansdóttir), a young city girl, shows up in town from Reykjavik to take a job at the local gas station. Awkward and stumbling, Noi manages to get a date but her father, a local bookseller, warns him to stay away from his daughter. On their "romantic" first date, they break into a local museum, Iris taking it on herself to break the glass on the front door while Noi attempts to jimmy the lock. They come across an exhibit showing places on a map but, as they discover, there's no button for Iceland, a rather apt metaphor.

Noi takes a job digging graves in the local cemetery where the priest hilariously attempts to use a remote control from his house to direct him where to dig a grave and the two haggle over the depth of the grave to be dug beneath tons of ice and snow. Noi's exasperation builds until he takes things into his own hand, which leads to a series of serio-comic adventures more emotionless than anything this side of Fargo. While the ending may ultimately be liberating, I was unprepared for the film's sudden dark turn. Kari, however, pulls it off and makes us care deeply about what happens to the icy town and its eccentric inhabitants. Noi Albinoi is an excellent first effort.

[See the IMDb page for "Noi albinoni" for cast names: none are known in the U.S.]

When I first heard the title of this film a while back I wondered why a film about the composer, Albinoni, would be coming from Iceland of all places. Then I learned it's about a somewhat wayward teen living in a frigid, remote and lonesome village in Iceland.

Noi is a high school drop-in. That means he occasionally attends classes to catch up on his sleep (after being awakened by grandma with an effective but uncommon alarm). He's an albino but little is made of that, his mutation being essentially a metaphor for the opacity of his slow, largely aimless direction.

Noi lives with his grandmother but he has a not atypical buddy/adversary relationship with his taxi driver drunkard dad. About the only real emotion this kid shows is concern for his father's feelings when the polite but exasperated principal expels the teen: sending in a Panasonic tape recorder to sub for his classroom presence was the last straw for the threatened teachers.

Noi doesn't work and he basically spends his time doing very little not that there's much to do in the snowbound neighborhood. A very pretty bookseller's daughter, Iris, from the city, is visiting her dad and working in a usually empty cafe appended to a gas station. Noi pursues her with the languid inattention that seems to characterize his life.

This isn't a typical bored teen flick. Noi seems to have real promise and no motivation. The ice walls surrounding his village are a prison and he has no plans to break out other than a ludicrous failed bank robbery and a car heist to set him off on a road to nowhere. As a collection of sketches suggesting that natural boundaries have consequences for a kid with a different take on life, "Noi" is interesting.

Ultimately Noi must face a challenge dropped on him, literally, by a natural disaster. What if anything he learns from the experience is unclear. There's no neat ending to this movie.

The excellent cinematography highlights the barrenness of Noi's village. I almost sustained snow glare watching this short film.

And speaking of its shortness, I do wonder why this ninety-three minute movie had an eighty-two minute running time in France. What could there have been to cut? There's enough minimalism in the full version.

8/10

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...

A rebellious 17 year old student (Tomas Lemarquis) is dissatisfied with his life in a remote Icelandic town. He meets a girl (Kristmunder Kristmundersson) who works at a petrol station and together they dream of a world away from the monotony of their small town existence.

This is only the second Icelandic film I have seen and I was extremely impressed by it. The acting was very professional, the cinematography worked well in creating atmosphere and the music, which I believe was by the director's band, was very apt for the story.

The story was very simple but I feel that simple stories can often work much better than a highly complex and over indulgent pieces.

The main characters restlessness probably strikes a chord with many people who as teenagers living in a small town yearned for somewhere and something different.

A Very well made and interesting piece which I would highly recommend.