Icelandic movie, "Noi"

"Noi" mysteriously plays around with the viewer's attention by juxtaposing its beautiful use of the color red, the exploitation of the barren and snow-white Icelandic landscape, with insufficiently developed characters who do not tell their stories, and a dramatic twist towards the end of the movie that may have struck a chord, albeit a lukewarm one. More a visual experience supported by music reminiscent of Sigur Ros's ambientic evocations and a slow build-up of tension as in Gus Van Sant's "Elephant", where the narrative is largely disjointed until a turn in the story, Noi is a romantic film because it is vague, distant, seemingly unreal, but never disturbingly baffling.

The bald-headed Noi, who hails from the city, lives with his grandmother in their house in Iceland's countryside. The most obvious character traits of Noi are laziness and disrespect towards his school, and an enigmantically quiet disposition, but more than that the viewer cannot tell. His "wonderkid" nature, disclosed after having been studied for the underlying reasons surrounding his problematic nature by a visiting psychiatrist to the school, is not expanded upon. There are scenes of a budding romance between Noi and Iris, the girl who works at the gas station and who is the daughter of the bookstore owner, or of Noi and his father eating at a restaurant, scenes that are little linked to one another from a narrative standpoint but all seem to feed to the viewer's imagination of the Noi character. The psychology of the film is simple and straight-forward, and the film's value lies in its being unobstrusively enigmatic and, in some ways, devoid of significant meaning