Bjarnfreðarson

Bjarnfreðarson (Director: Ragnar Bragason): Based on a pop­ular Icelandic tele­vi­sion show, Bjarnfreðarson topped the domestic box office for sev­eral weeks last Christmastime, besting even James Cameron’s Avatar. Although I sus­pect that famili­arity with some of the TV show’s plot­lines would enrich the exper­i­ence, the film works quite well as a stan­dalone story, and if any­thing, it’s made me eager to seek out the rest of the series.

We first meet Georg Bjarnfreðarson (Jón Gnarr, who co-wrote the script with Bragason) as he’s being granted parole from prison. Despite his protests that he never applied, he’s forced out and we soon under­stand why. Georg is a tyrant, imposing his own will on everyone and everything around him. Flashbacks show us the reasons. The son of a very unique single mother, Georg was raised as a veget­arian fem­inist com­munist and was expected to be a “great man.” Instead, his mis­ad­ven­tures landed him in the slammer. Upon his release, his mother refuses to see him, so he crashes with Daniel, with whom he spent time in prison.

The nerdy Daniel is not someone you’d expect to have a crim­inal record, but appar­ently he got caught up in one of Georg’s schemes and did some time. Now, he’s about to graduate from med­ical school. At least, that’s what his wife and par­ents think. Secretly, he’s been studying art instead. Also living with them is Olafur, another prison buddy. He’s a 40-year-old who thinks he’s still 20, and when he loses his job as a delivery driver, an amazing piece of luck leads him to his true calling as a radio DJ.

Watching these three char­ac­ters interact, it’s no wonder that they’ve fea­tured in an entire series. What the film does, though, is to probe the oddball Georg’s back­story, and in the pro­cess, make us care about him. As we see him being picked on throughout his child­hood, we realize that he’s never known a normal life or normal rela­tion­ships. His desire to bond with the goofy Oli leads to some hil­arity, but in the end, these mis­fits really do need each other.

Though this reminded me in parts of Canada’s own Trailer Park Boys, there was some­thing deeper at work here. Although guilty of a few instances of poor taste (including giving Daniel a mentally-challenged brother-in-law and a father reduced to mum­bling inco­her­ently after a stroke), the film does convey a real sense of out­siders trying to make a new begin­ning, of trying to escape the per­sonas that have been forced upon them. That the film is able to achieve this while also providing plen­tiful laughs is a credit to the filmmakers.

In any case, it has me pre­pared to spend large sums of money to watch the rest of the story. And ship­ping DVDs from Iceland isn’t cheap, you know.

(8/10)

Tagged as: #mwff10, iceland