Film - Philip Kerr is surprisingly uplifted by a story about two Norwegian misfits
Just for the record I like Norway and I like the Norwegians, but the last time I was in Oslo, on a book tour, I found myself feeling just a little depressed. My general lassitude and spurts of morbid sensitivity might have had something to do with the fact that I had chosen to mark my visit by rereading Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger, not to mention an early visit to the National Museum to see the paintings of Edvard Munch. Or it might have had something to do with the light: there's a cold cast to the juxtaposition of Oslo's flaming sunsets and blue-black fjords that fills my Pictish blood with melancholy, like a great scream passing through nature. It couldn't have helped that my Pictish blood was full of alcohol most of the time I was there, but then how else was I going to fix a professional I'm-enjoying-myself grin to my face for hours on end?
In contrast to the Norwegians, who seem uniformly beautiful and healthy, I felt mean and ludicrous, like Hedda Gabler, especially when I was having my picture taken. There must be ugly, unhealthy-looking people somewhere in Norway, but I certainly didn't see any - just shiny, happy ones holding hands. Which made me wonder where all the Knuts who were nuts - the loonies for which Norway is, after all, justly famous, having given us Hamsun, Munch, Ibsen, Arthur Andersen and Thor Heyerdahl (you have to be a bit of a loony to sail across the Pacific on a balsa wood raft) - were to be found. Now that I've seen Elling, an Academy Award nominee in 2002 for Best Foreign Film, I think I know the answer. In Norway, far from painting canvases about death or writing books about despair, these days even the loonies are shiny, happy people holding hands.
After a two-year stretch at the Broynes psychiatric institute, Elling (Per Christian Ellefsen) and his gentle, giant room-mate, Kjell Bjarne, are discharged and given a handsome apartment in Oslo by the nice Norwegian government. Kjell Bjarne's problem is that, like Lennie in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, he's a couple of herrings short of the full smorgasbord. Elling's case is a little more complicated but he's the fastidious type, which is to say that he's neurotic and a bit of a pain. Frank Asli, a tough social worker - you can tell he's tough because he wears an unfriendly-looking sweater and doesn't shave very much - lays it on the line for Oslo's answer to the Odd Couple: make it work for yourselves or it's back to the asylum. For all his stubble and uncompromising language, Frank tries his best for Elling and Kjell Bjarne. That's the nice thing about care in the community, Norwegian-style; the community really does care.
The two misfits quickly recognise that this is their last chance at surviving in society. But this is not easy. Elling regards even a trip to a restaurant as comparable to a South Pole expedition, while Kjell Bjarne, a fortysomething virgin, just wants to find a woman. Gradually, these two tryptophan trolls overcome their inadequacies and it soon becomes clear that their mutual problems are not clinical so much as social: nobody has ever really given either of them any opportunities or had faith in them. Kjell Bjarne meets a woman, albeit a pregnant one, in the upstairs apartment who seems desperate to meet any kind of man, even one as dim and unwashed as Kjell Bjarne; while Elling, whose life, like Peer Gynt's, has previously consisted of tall tales and reckless behaviour, encounters a stranger who provides some morbid humour and a new sense of direction in life. The stranger turns out to be a famous poet, and Elling suddenly realises that he, too, wishes to become a poet; this is, after all, a perfect career choice for people who are psychologically damaged and socially maladjusted. (I have never yet met a poet who didn't belong in a straitjacket, and most of the poetry read- ings I've been to have felt more like group-therapy sessions.)
Based on the bestseller Blood Brothers by Ingvar Ambjornsen (I'm sure you've all read it), Elling didn't sound like a film I was going to enjoy.
But far from being depressing and miserable, it's really quite enjoyable and I can strongly recommend it if you've got nothing better to do. The many European film awards that it has already received will, doubtless, do more than I can to persuade you that it's worth a look. If I do have a reservation about Elling, it is that I came away from the film thinking that a story about two psychiatric patients successfully rejoining the community could only work in a shiny, happy place such as Oslo.
Elling (15) is at selected cinemas
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