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.

[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

Coming of age films are a common staple of Hollywood but as with many genres they merely offer variations on a theme. Noi Albinoi is a beautiful film in so many ways from the breathtaking landscape of Iceland to the often used but even more often forgotten ideal of carpe diem (sieze the day). Noi himself is completely believable for anyone who's ever been a teenager, he is an excellent reflection of the aspirations, naievaty and irrepresable emotions that everyone feels at that age. This film kept me amused and touched in equal measures all the way up to its amazing climax. A must see for everyone who understands that life's different when you're 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.

You really have to like this kind of movie. The film mainly depicts the boredom and isolation that a teenager in a tiny distant village finds himself in. This will naturally result in a story where nothing really spectacular happens. This is of course necessary to depict the situation in a realistic way, but a lot of films in this genre tend to get boring themselves.

At least this film had plenty of entertainment to keep the viewer's attention. To begin with there's the magnificent imagery of the impressive Islandic landscape. But I'd mainly recommend this film because of the perfect mix of beautiful realism and tragicomedy.

All together a much more colorful result than many would expect from this kind of film and setting.