Beautiful Beings

After “Balli” (Áskell Einar Pálmason) is badly beaten up by some violent bullies, he arrives at school looking more like the lead in “Phantom of the Opera” than a pupil at a standard Icelandic comprehensive, and that attracts the teasing of “Addi” (Birgir Dagur Bjarkason) and his two friends “Siggi” (Snorri Rafn Frimansson) and “Konni” (Viktor Benóny Benediktsson). Quite quickly, though, all of these boys realise that the drug-fuelled broken homes that most of them come from suggest they have more in common than not, and soon “Balli” is taking them back to the fairly squalid home he shares with his mother and his sister for some mushroom-induced fun with an hoover! These boys aren’t perfect, by any means, and “Konni” loves nothing more than a good fist-fight. That skill might come in handy as the story also happens to touch on the ability of “Addi” to tap into what his mother calls the “subconscious”. It’s during one of his fairly vivid dreams that he guesses that a regular visitor to the home of “Balli” and his family is something of a brute, and that the boys are going to have to intervene. This doesn’t quite go to plan, though, and so has ramifications for all four as the consequences impact on each with varying degrees of profundity. I haven’t seen a lot of Icelandic cinema and this film certainly isn’t one that would have the tourist board queuing up to invest, but the efforts from all four teenagers here really do present a gritty and realistic vision of life in poorly maintained public housing, where society largely left them to their own devices and where any senses of discipline and loyalty were borne out of their own experiences rather than any sense of traditional family structure and behaviour. There is actually quite a sense of the inevitable about their path for much of the film, and that bleakness is illustrated clearly by some intimate photography and some very dark humour as well as being delivered by the sparing but potent dialogue from both voices and baseball bats. Essentially it is a powerful story about friendship and inter-reliance, but there’s isn’t even a sniff of cheese or sentimentality at any point in these proceedings and despite the pervading culture of bad is as bad does, perhaps there might be some well deserved light at the end of the tunnel for them, after all?