Elling

It's no secret that Elling and his buddy Kjell Bjarne have stolen my heart. They are adorable characters. Looking at them, I see elements of so many people I know (that must not be a good thing!).

I first saw Elsk meg i morgen at a Scandinavian film festival in Athens. I instantly 'fell' in love with the simplicity and the mundane adorability of the characters. They could be my neighbors next door (literally) and yet, Petter Næss makes them look so deep and multidimensional, that every trivial, ritualistic task of their everyday lives, becomes a new adventure. All those things we take for granted, to them they are like battlefields that need to be conquered.

I cracked up to the point of having tears in my eyes with Elling's reaction in the library, when he was laughing aloud at the statistics of how many Americans suffer from post-traumatic stress because of their belief that they have been abducted by alien UFOs:D

Days later, I laughed hysterically at Elling's reaction when he saw "the view at the mediterrenean" from his hotel room in Spain in the prequel Mors Elling (2003), where we actually also see Elling's mom appearing in the film, with Elling as a comical/satyrical version of Norman Bates in the norwegian "Psycho", taking place in a cheap, second-class mediterranean tourist destination for scandinavian pensioners...Surreal!!

I have seen so many Hollywood comedies that try too hard to make you laugh, and yet nothing comes across as spontaneously hilarious as the reaction of an unsuspecting Scandinavian who stands shocked before the view of the dirty little alley, full of empty beer cans, garbage and cat excrements, in the back of his hotel room, the one that was descrived as "view at the mediterranean" in the tourist brochures.

Click here for the trailer of the third part of the trilogy. Skål til Helvete!!