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COOL
AND CRAZY
6/10
Heftig
og Begeistret : Norway 2001
director
: Knut Erik Jensen
(documentary)
cinematography : Robert Nordstrom
editing : Helene Berlin
105 minutes
The
worst thing about Cool and Crazy is that awful title, which makes
it sound like a desperately wacky extreme-sports drama. In fact, the documentary
covers a male-voice choir operating out of the icy Norwegian village of
Berlevag: while the members are often so literally ‘cool’ they’re in danger
of freezing solid, they’re hardly the hippest bunch of performers you’ll
ever meet. Most of them are getting on - the oldest are 96 and 87 - and
and the only ‘craziness’ on view is the foolhardy way they brave the elements,
standing outside in subzero temperatures as they bellow out hymns, sea
shanties and folk-tunes.
But
C&C is no cosy exercise in ‘nowt so weird as folk’ quaintness.
We get to know some of the singers, and they come from all kinds of backgrounds
and walks of life – the only classification the choir is bothered about
is the strictly neutral matter of vocal tone. Berlevag has seen its main
industry, fishing, decline rapidly over the past few years, and the choir
is one of the few institutions left to bind the community together: at
one point, someone remarks that the only things keeping the place from
oblivion are the choir and the local breakwater. As an accessible slice
of political-social anthropology the film shows the likes of Brassed
Off up for the flimsy feel-good entertainments they are: we’re perhaps
closer to John Sayles’ post-fishing Alaska drama Limbo, with the
choir’s defiance of the elements also representing their stand against
even harsher winds of economic and social upheaval. The film’s achievement
is to get this message across without any trace of preachiness, but plenty
of humour.
Any
choir worth its salt can produce a rousing sound – add this to the understanding
we gain of the men as individuals, and as components of their wider community,
and it’s easy to be swept along. But some aspects of the film remain troubling:
the obvious extremity of the noisy weather conditions means that a considerable
degree of post-production overdubbing must have been necessary, and many
of the outside performances in unusual, dramatic settings are rather too
plainly staged for the benefit of the camera. The film makes most of its
points in its striking first half-hour – there is a climax of sorts, in
which the choir treks out to the Soviet port of Murmansk, where a remnant
of heroic Soviet statuary reduces the most left-wing of the singers to
tears. But there’s no real progression in terms of placing the singers
in a wider context, and we never get much of an idea how the organisation
is funded, or what its future plans may be.
Then
again, Cool and Crazy has enjoyed sufficient international exposure
to make the singers a major draw on the worldwide choral circuit, perhaps
even providing Berlevag with a few much-needed tourist visitors. So even
if it lacks that certain cinematic something to take it
on to the next level, it’s an admirable, engaging and thoroughly humanistic
piece of work, and it would certainly take a very hard heart not to be
moved by its closing images of the choir singing in the teeth of an Arctic
blizzard, icicles forming around their wrinkled, indomitable mouths as
the screen whites out.
17th
December, 2001
(seen Dec-7-01, Kosmos, Tallinn – Black Nights
Film Festival)
by Neil
Young
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