Noi, the eponymous hero of NOI ALBINOI (Tomas Lemarquis), is a pale guy in a pale country. Hes more than pale, really, hes an albino and the country is Iceland in winter. A small town in northern Iceland in winter, actually. He lives with his grandmother, who is sweet enough, but seems to be in a sleepwalking state most of the time, and there are the occasional bonding sessions with his drunken, Elvis-obsessed father.
There is little to do but drink beer, smoke cigarettes and cut school. Theres also a new girl in his small town, and target practice using killer icicles, but other than that Noi is drifting just like the glaciers covering his island home. Hes a good kid, well-liked by everyone, even his long-suffering teachers and the crabby owner of the villages only bookstore. Hes also fairly bright to judge from the way he makes short work of a Rubicks cube and sparks to Kierkegaard, but not exactly cut out for school, though one has to admire his compromise about showing up by sending a tape recorder in his stead. This is a life of tedium punctuated with particularly bad karaoke and the odd stewpot of pigs blood gone wrong. No wonder that Noi has fixated on Hawaii.
Writer/director Dagur Kari tells this small but affecting tale with beautifully composed shots that are stark in their perfect rendering of the sort of isolation that gets under the skin and burrows in with extreme prejudice. Whether photographed singly or in groups, the people in his viewfinder are overwhelmed by their surroundings, even if they be cramped rooms or nondescript gas stations. In his hands, NOI becomes a moody and melancholy tone poem. Lemarquis embodies that atmosphere, with is shiny bald head and odd, white-lashed eyes, he maintains an outward calm that is almost cheerful while offering a studied glimpses of the turmoil beneath. Is it because hes so much smarter than the people around him? Is it that he feels even more like a misfit than most adolescents because of the albino thing? Its something that no one ever remarks on, not even the outside psychiatrist that fortuitously shows up when Nois problems begin to explode, but which Kari never lets us forget, consistently keeping the focus on how the world at large sees Noi using the device of having the audience see that world from Nois point of view without ever letting it into Nois head. The film, like the world Kari has brought to life, is a quirky place where people have no problem pretending to maintain an even keel about what life has dealt them, and where the humor is tempered by the sort of pain that plays tag-team with boredom.
NOI ALBINOI is a quiet, enigmatic film, as though the lives of these people have been as muffled by the ice and snow as the sounds of village life have been. Its charm is subtle, its impact sneaky, it effect memorable.
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