Norwegian theatrical release poster

Our son walked over to the local library branch, taking along his father's library membership card.  Although we haven't had a working television set in the house since the changeover to digital transmission a year and a half ago, we do use an old television set to view films for entertainment, once a week.  Our son is a movie buff, he is interested in repertoire-type films, and those are, for the most part, European, not American films.

He's primarily interested in human interaction, not violent action which mostly characterizes American films with their penchant for unrealistic and nihilistic violence, conspiracy-secret-agent-apocalyptic-types, close-up sexual encounters and viewer titillation, not explication.  The explicitly mindless is not attractive to the thinking mind.

In any event, we viewed the Norwegian film A Somewhat Gentle Man in its understated mordant humour and contextual gentle undertones with interest.  The transition from imprisonment as state punishment for cold-blooded murder, to becoming once again a free man illustrated through this screenplay the manner in which people are vulnerable to thinking they are free, despite malevolent and often happenstance manipulation by others and by events proving them to be anything but free.

Despite which people do have free will and do have the capacity to challenge the various pressures brought upon them to behave in a manner that others expect them to.  The main figure in this piece had a decided mind of his own and his brutality was leavened by his obvious empathy for others.  The risible comedy of a succession of women playing the sexual aggressor, roles generally reserved for the male gender, while amusing, was also disturbing in its own casual brutality of both reality and romanticism.

Strand Releasing

Jannike Kruse and Stellan Skarsgard in “A Somewhat Gentle Man.” 

It was, as billed, a dark comedy built upon an authentic enough dilemma of human need, emotional dependence and the vicissitudes of fate and fortune.

The visual aspect of filming in a northern advanced society displays, to North American sensibilities, an urban landscape whose industrialized technology encapsulates and describes even its grim architecture.  Elsewhere northern landscapes are portrayed with the softening effects of an urban genteel feel, complete with domestic architecture of some charm.  Absent here, in the spare, sparse functionality of Norwegian society.

There is a bleakness in the overall portrayal of general society there, which may or may not entirely reflect what does pertain.  But there is no element of charm within it whatever; it seems grim and forbidding.  

Aside from which the film was an excellent production of its appealing genre.  Excellent acting on all counts, and the portrait of a conflicted, complex mind engagingly and convincingly (slyly and professionally) portrayed by its principle actor, Stellan Skarsgard.