Bleak yet comic, ‘Noi’ is a singular tale of teen’s pain

“Noi” is not what you might be expecting, if you expect anything at all from an Icelandic picture about a disaffected teenager at odds with his life.

For while even the thought of suffering through another adolescent identity crisis may be painful, this debut from writer-director Dagur Kari will ease your mind.

An impeccably made bleak comedy with an exactly calibrated, almost musical sense of timing, “Noi” is singular enough to have swept the Eddas, the Icelandic Academy Awards, and been an official selection at more than 30 film festivals, including Telluride, Rotterdam and Toronto.

“Noi” is also another welcome standard-bearer for the immediately recognizable, dark Scandinavian sense of humor made familiar by, among others, the Norwegian “Kitchen Stories,” the films of Finland’s Aki Kourasmaki and a fine previous Icelandic feature, “101 Reykjavik.”

Droll, dry and delicate, it’s the kind of humor that makes it hard to decide if “Noi” is a comic story with tragic elements or the other way around. As its director of photography Rasmus Videbaek told American Cinematographer magazine, “We’ve developed this slightly ‘off’ way of seeing, an overall feeling of being on a different planet.”

Speaking of another planet, “Noi” benefits from a spectacular sense of place. It was filmed in the town of Bolungarvik, population 957, a village on Iceland’s far northwest tip that is remote even by that country’s standards.

Working in Super 16 millimeter, cinematographer Videbaek shows us an Iceland that looks grand, frozen and mysterious, where the constant winter whiteness defines oppressive and it is all too possible to be overwhelmed by the stark, despairing beauty of the landscape. It’s a place where even normal life develops a decidedly surreal quality.

As indicated by its original title, “Noi Albinoi,” 17-year-old Noi (Tomas Lemarquis) is an albino high school student. At least technically he’s in high school, though his constant absences frustrate both his teachers and his ordinarily detached family.

Noi lives with his eccentric grandmother Lina (Anna Fridriksdottir), who shoots a rifle out the window near his bed to keep him from oversleeping. His layabout, alcoholic dad, Kiddi (Throstur Leo Gunnarsson), the town taxi driver and a major Elvis fan, shows up periodically to offer fatherly advice.

When he needs to escape, which he often does, Noi goes to the local bookstore, where the crabby owner, surrounded by a forest of empty Coke bottles, is prone to read aloud nihilistic passages from Kierkegaard before throwing the book in the trash. Or else Noi retreats to a secret space under his house, an empty personal Bat Cave where he simply sits and thinks.

One of the gifts of Kari’s direction and Lemarquis’ performance is that we can see before the film offers proof that Noi is not a bad boy but simply a bright and bored one. And who wouldn’t despair in such an environment, a place where it seems only a small step from disdain to madness and a job digging graves in the middle of winter is considered a plum position.

A trapped dreamer, Noi allows himself only two means of escape. One is a View-Master, a gift from his grandmother, through which he looks at calming shots of tropical Polynesia. The other is the presence of Iris (Elin Hansdottir), a new girl in town who energizes his desire to leave.

One surprise of “Noi” is its excellent instrumental soundtrack, playful, tuneful music by a group called “slowblow” that turns out to be writer-director Kari and a friend. It’s also no accident that one of Kiddi’s favorite Elvis songs is the classic “In the Ghetto.” Though the film is too knowing to come out and say it, the message that wasted lives can occur as easily in the vastness of Iceland as in the mean streets of Detroit is not hard to hear.

In his first feature, writer-director Kari shows great control over his material. He makes room for deadpan sequences, such as a high school teacher preparing mayonnaise, and nicely blends professional actors like Lemarquis with nonpros: Fridriksdottir, who plays Noi’s grandmother, delivers the mail in the director’s neighborhood.

Kari even makes the film’s tricky point of view -- apocalyptic but somehow hopeful -- one we can embrace. One of his favorite quotes, he’s said, is the following from Francois Truffaut: “This is the third time it’s happened to me -- starting a film with the thought that it’s going to be amusing and realizing along the way that it will be saved only by its sadness.”

*

‘Noi’

MPAA rating: PG-13 for language and brief nudity

Times guidelines: Serious treatment of teen issues

Tomas Lemarquis...Noi

Throstur Leo Gunnarsson...Kiddi Beikon

Elin Hansdottir...Iris

Anna Fridriksdottir...Lina

A Zik Zak Filmworks and The Coproduction Office production, released by Palm Pictures. Director Dagur Kari. Producers Philippe Bober, Kim Magnusson, Skuli Fr. Malmquist, Thorir Snaer Sigurjonsson. Executive producers Lene Ingemann, Tivi Magnusson, Susanne Marian. Screenplay Dagur Kari. Cinematographer Rasmus Videbaek. Editor Daniel Dencik. Costumes Linda B. Arnadottir, Tanja Dehmel. Music Slowblow. Set design Jon Steinar Ragnarsson. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes.

In limited release.