Cold Lunch

Wait wasn't that called the Butterfly effect? Maybe it's different in Europe some may say ... probably those who think of Europe as a big country with not a lot of differences. I reckon the same could be true of the nowadays more divided than united states of America ... but that's a different story - literally.

My train of thoughts sometimes really gets the best of me and there is almost no stopping me ... except taking away the keyboard. Please don't do that. But back to this, that has the lifes of a few people intermingled and intertwined. When one thing happens, that leads to another ... the ripple effect and all that. Or life ... things could be differently if ... yes and always. Sometimes we don't even know why or how we got into certain situations ... as a viewer we at least see a bigger picture here. I personally liked what the movie did, even if I don't understand all the characters .. but that's also life ... and different people being wired differently.

This film has no originality. It portrays people with problems which we have gotten used to seeing in many other films, including many from Norway, Denmark, Iceland... There is nothing special about their situation as far as film characters are concerned and these people are portrayed with little connection to their past, surroundings or friends. They are seemingly connected to each other by a series of events started by Christer's ego-centric behavior - which we understand is what drove his friends away from him.

The director apparently attempted to pay homage to Hitchcock's The Birds (which is signaled right at the beginning with a poster of the film hung on the wall of Christer's kitchen) but it fails miserably. The end, where we see Lina swimming in the rain, is very disappointing, despite Annie Lennox's beautiful voice.

As far as feature debuts go, Eva Sørhaug's is notable for its narrative and stylistic ambitions: merging the dry wit of Aki Kaurismäki with the multi-character storytelling of Paul Thomas Anderson, both taken out of their original contexts and placed in the gray everyday life of Oslo, capital city of Norway.

Unlike Magnolia or Short Cuts, Cold Lunch limits its focus on three characters: Leni (Ane Dahl Torp), an introverted girl who is faced with the grim reality of unemployment and financial needs when her father suddenly dies; Christer (Aksel Henne), a troubled teenager who struggles to pay his rent and has father issues; and Heidi (Pia Tjelta), a family mother who finds herself between her newborn baby and her abusive husband Odd (Kyrre Haugen Sydness), who either offends, beats or ignores her all the time.

The atmosphere is very Scandinavian, with a particular nod to the minimalistic humor present in Kaurismäki's work. On her own part, Sørhaug adds a winning chromatic contrast, emphasizing how the characters lead gray existences while living in white or red apartments. The slow pace, very understated acting and off-beat humor enable her to paint a conventional but entertaining portrait of today's society.

The real problem, ironically, comes when she tries to connect the dots (imagine Magnolia's frog rain with seagulls instead of frogs), as the film all of a sudden shifts to another genre and leads to one of the three plot strands ending in a rather disappointing way. But once the surrealistic digression is out of the way, Cold Lunch gets back on track and ends just like it started: quirky, oddly funny and occasionally moving.