Noi the Albino

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.

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.

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...