Director/Co-writer: Pal Sletaune
Best Film Critics Week 1997 Cannes
Silver Prize 1997 Toronto Film Festival Young Cinema
Roy: Robert Skjaerstad
Line: Andrine Saether
Georg: Per Egil Aske
Betsy: Eli Anne Linnestad |
Everyone else seems to be talking about the Oscars. But ARTS alive loves to be different. So this week we're taking you to Norway!
If you are into the current trend of urban grittiness with an edge of black comedy, then you will get a buzz out of "Junk Mail", a first feature by a young Norwegian director, Pal Sletanna.
Yeah, OK, so there are subtitles, but don't let that put you off.
Happily "Junk Mail" is nowhere as bleak as films like "Trainspotting", but it does have that feeling of urban hopelessness. The tightly written script delivers numerous unexpected twists and there are strong performances and numerous laughs. You can't help but like the "hero", or the anti-hero, Roy, a down-at-heel mailman who lives in a grotty flat, next door to an apartment that is being renovated for the umpteenth time - the reverberations of a jack hammer frequently threaten to re-arrange his shelves.
Things aren't much better at work, there Roy has to put up with the Gestapo-like behaviour of his supervisors, who insist that everyone has to be good at something -- even if it's rattling off a list of names by rote; and also the unwanted attentions of one of his workmates. He seeks relief from all this hassle by dumping the junk mail in a railway tunnel which gives him time to read the more interesting love-letters.
Enter Line, a partially deaf young woman who works in the local drycleaners. One day she leaves her keys in the mailbox and our "hero" can't resist letting himself into her apartment and into a series of dramatic events, which include murder, robbery, suicide and passion.
Robert Skjaerstad (Roy) apparently spent six months in worn down shoes to achieve the right postal walk and installed a row of mailboxes in his apartment to practise his "art" as a mailman.
Andrine Saether (Line) walked around with cotton-balls in her ears to feel what it is like to be partially deaf. Who says actors don't earn their way!
"Junk Mail" is tightly and deafly scripted. It has interesting characters. I had a few problems maybe with the ending, but then postmodernism always means it leaves it open.
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