Miracle

Or I guess rather ”Mirakel” which is the Norwegian title of the movie I saw yesterday. It is actually a bit daunting being in the cinema on the first viewing of a movie where one of your best friends has been the director. I was dreading before the movie started that I would not like it. Being in a “profession” where I’m so dependent on honest feedback from other people, I could never allow myself to be anything but honest with my friends as well. When the movie started I knew that if I ended up hating the film, I would have no other choice but to say so afterwards.

Today I’ve been reading the critiques of the movie in the Norwegian newspapers. VG was the best one with a 4 (out of 6 which is a top score), Dagbladet gave the movie a 3 and Aftenposten gave it a 2.

I’m pretty sure that whoever VG sent to see this movie did actually see the same film as I did, what movie the people from Dagbladet and Aftenposten saw I can’t imagine – it can’t have been “Mirakel”, because this actually was a good movie.

I am traditionally very sceptical when it comes to Norwegian movies. They traditionally used to be very very strange and most often horribly bad, this has been changing in the last 5 – 6 years or so and now every so often good movies are made in Norway as well and this is one of them.

It’s a romantic comedy with a small portion of tragedy on the side. There’s something very “Notting Hill” meets “Four weddings and a funeral” about it, and I simply loved those two films and this Norwegian version of a romantic comedy actually works. And I wasn’t the only one to think so. There were lots of laughter, some tears and even one occasion of spontaneous applause (all at the appropriate place in the film) among the audience and there can’t be better proof of quality than that. If I was to give points to this film it would end up at around 4.5 – and that’s not bad. So to all my Norwegian friends: GO SEE!

And the party after the movie wasn’t half bad either…..