Tidbit: the title of the movie refers to the title and opening line of the previous national anthem of Norway.
The movie deals with a boy who turns to punk in order to distinguish himself from his freaked-out new-age dad in the late 1970ies. To make a short story a bit longer: a happy lefty-alternative family is shattered up when the mother is killed by a runaway driver. The youngest son goes away to live with friends of the family, the father becomes even more eccentric, and the previously somewhat soft elder boy turns to being a punk, all this to the backdrop of staid 1970ies Norway.
What could have been a tragicomedy turns out to be neither really a tragedy nor -- unfortunately -- really a comedy. And it is a long shot from the quirky Scandinavian comedy that I expected. While I liked many of the actors, especially the leads (Sven Nordin as Magnus the dad, and Asmund Hoeg as Nikolaj the wayward son) and the film's setup (at least it's not your usual hippie movie plot about a bunch of carrot-eating stoners), the plot is mostly erratic and incoherent. It just didn't do it for me. Magnus is an architect and comes across the idea of building a revolutionary glass house -- in the late 1970ies, when this idea was already several decades old. Or Magnus has loud sex in a nudist camp, although this would usually result in him being kicked out (nudism is not to be confused with free-love activism). All this gave me the impression that the filmmakers quickly ran out of ideas and were desperately trying to kill time before rolling the credits. The end of the film sucks as well, by the way. Other directors such as Marcus H. Rosenmüller have made much better tragicomedies about similar topics (e. g. "Summer In Orange").
The movie deals with a boy who turns to punk in order to distinguish himself from his freaked-out new-age dad in the late 1970ies. To make a short story a bit longer: a happy lefty-alternative family is shattered up when the mother is killed by a runaway driver. The youngest son goes away to live with friends of the family, the father becomes even more eccentric, and the previously somewhat soft elder boy turns to being a punk, all this to the backdrop of staid 1970ies Norway.
What could have been a tragicomedy turns out to be neither really a tragedy nor -- unfortunately -- really a comedy. And it is a long shot from the quirky Scandinavian comedy that I expected. While I liked many of the actors, especially the leads (Sven Nordin as Magnus the dad, and Asmund Hoeg as Nikolaj the wayward son) and the film's setup (at least it's not your usual hippie movie plot about a bunch of carrot-eating stoners), the plot is mostly erratic and incoherent. It just didn't do it for me. Magnus is an architect and comes across the idea of building a revolutionary glass house -- in the late 1970ies, when this idea was already several decades old. Or Magnus has loud sex in a nudist camp, although this would usually result in him being kicked out (nudism is not to be confused with free-love activism). All this gave me the impression that the filmmakers quickly ran out of ideas and were desperately trying to kill time before rolling the credits. The end of the film sucks as well, by the way. Other directors such as Marcus H. Rosenmüller have made much better tragicomedies about similar topics (e. g. "Summer In Orange").