Jonny Vang (2003)

Fresh and Exciting

Absolutely Fantastic

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Blistering performances.

Jonny Vang is a comedy about longtime friends involved in a love triangle. Jonny, Tuva and Magnus were all close friends as children. Now that they have grown, Tuva and Magnus are married and have a son. Magnus' recent behavior leads Tuva to believe he is being unfaithful to her. She responds by having an affair with Jonny. Jonny is attempting to launch his own worm farm, but his life goes downhill as soon as he asks Tuva to marry him. I just saw this film with a friend. It is really cool and funny with a great soundtrack by Calexico. The Mexican music scoring Norwegian landscape is great. Those of you who likes laid-back comedies should try to get hold of this DVD. Aksel Hennie is very cool.

This is a little bit of a mess but above average for norwegian standards. One celebrates the film's lack of pretence and its energy and pace.It's all about an enterprising farmer lad and his attempts and failures in the dullest of worlds.The movie does its best to make us embrace Jonny, but he's not as sympathetic to the audience as the filmmakers supposed. To start with he cheats his best friend by sleeping with his wife. Further stuff happens in a rather little and uneventful plot, the more they deal with "important issues of life", the more it fails due to questionable moral standpoints. Slowly by slowly, we're all eventually backing Jonny and his misfortunes, that could had lead to a pandemonium in the `After Hours' fashion but stays somewhere in between the fiords of dulland. The script struggles to introduce `freaky' elements and to portrait an abundance of local color just for the sake of being different, the most disturbing being the perpetual mariachi score that somehow doesn't fit too good in the universe displayed on screen.The direction is inexistent. Not a trace of dramatic use of camera and way too many misleading scenes. In addition, some angles and editing are in the realms of bad gusto.As every norwegian film there's a necessity of showing the landscape but here is not too fastidious and in a way works into the narrative. The acting is generally theatrical, being Laila Goody's performance the best of the cast.The director wants us to think that Jonny is too special in relation to such an environment, but when he has the opportunity to leave and make big time he turns back and stays. I would say that applies to the movie too.Anyways, it's a noble effort to universalize (americanize?) the repetitive norwegian film industry and that's pretty good news.