Elling

Elling is forty and has lived his whole life with his mother. When she dies he is placed in an institution, where Kjell Bjarne becomes his roommate. The two are discharged into a state flat in Oslo and a social worker comes to check on them regularly. The condition is simple: they must run daily life themselves. Elling cannot answer the telephone, Kjell Bjarne cannot speak to women, and neither of them finds it easy to go outside. Petter Næss directs. Per Christian Ellefsen plays Elling and Sven Nordin plays Kjell Bjarne. The source is Ingvar Ambjørnsen's novels. What the film does is refuse to dramatise mental illness. There is no crisis scene; the difficulty consists of small things, entering a restaurant, doing the shopping, speaking to a neighbour, and the comedy comes out of that. Elling begins writing poems and hides them inside packets of pickles in the supermarket, which is the idea people remember. The relationship between the two carries the film: they never show each other any affection and cannot get through a day apart. It was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2002. Who it is for: viewers who like Scandinavian comedy and small scale human stories. Who it is not for: very little happens, the pace is calm, and the film nowhere treats its characters' condition as a serious problem.