Mot naturen

a large slice of every day reality. simple. honest. maybe, courageous. because it is a film like a mirror. reflecting middle age crisis. defining the life as a large circle of doubts. exploring rules and social expectations and the idea of new beginning in life, the lost of youth, the responsibilities as head of family, the pressure of need to be free, to have time for yourself, to escape from different forms of hypocrisy, to be happy, real happy, to have the innocence and the clear purposes of the first ages. Martin is portrait of many viewers. profound different viewers. and this did "Mot naturen" a masterpiece. because, different by many films, it did not gives a story. but reminds yours story. with precision and realism and out of any mask. proposing an answer. in many cases - the only who works.

Out of nature (Original title: Ut mot naturen) is a different film from most. Much of the movie goes inside Martin's head, while we see what he is doing. As a narrative voice, we go through his random, and sometimes senseless, thoughts.

Martin is a man in the early 30'ies, married and has a son. He's happily married. Or is he? He's really not completely sure. He's going on a jogging trip up to the mountains. He looks forward to it, but is still having regrets for not going on a party and bad consciousness about not staying at home with his family. This is the start of the journey inside Martin's head. He's like the rest (or most?) of us. He thinks rapidly and sometimes have strange thoughts and stupid associations.

I must admit my head and thoughts works just like this. You sometimes have to battle thoughts and ideas, fears, pains, worries, regrets, bad consciousness, anger, fantasies, dreams, envy, happiness, struggle, satisfaction, excitement, awe... you name it. Whatever he does, he can'travel without his thoughts. His family is clearly with him while he is out in God's free nature.

Sometimes his thoughts are upright funny, even hilarious. The strong points of this film is recognition as well as the humor put into it. You'll never know when the humor occurs.

This is Ole Giæver's film. He has written it, produced it and is playing Martin in the main role. Often you can say that this isn't a very good idea, doing all this, but this film functions well. It's also been very much appreciated by both critics and cinema goers in Norway. The film premiered at TIFF in Toronto, where it got much acclaim. So it did at the Berlin Film Festival. Later on Ole Giæver won the prize for best male actor in Tromsø International Fim Festival, the Kanon-prize.

The film is also a nature-appreciation film. With nature in the area around Tromsø in the North of Norway. This film is a result of the growing film milieu in this area, and shows a innovative approach. The film is surprisingly interesting and grabs you more than you would expect. A good watch for the mind.

You can find a lot of summary of the film, so I would like to write my opinions of the film. I've just watched it at the Film Festival of Trento (02/05/2016) I think that the film is absolutely true! I would like to know where and how Ole Giaever has got inspiration for it because this is a real situation. Changement is part of our life and when we get older we think back to our decisions and choices. It's not easy to get along well with our husband or our wife for ever. It's not easy to grow up children because we have always to sacrifice a part of our life to concentrate our efforts to someone else who need of our help to live. Our life change, our priorities changes and one morning we wake up with a doubt and this doubt generate other doubts and other thoughts and so on. When we are young we see the world with other eyes, we have another perspective we are more instinctive. We think that life is easy, it's easy to get married, it's easy to nurture a kid. Because our upbringing, our community has teaches us that success in our life is having a stable job, having a good education, rising a family, being a good husband a good dad... This is a straight path, easy because everything is defined, clear but often we don't take the time to ask ourselves: "Is this my way? Do I have different opinion? Can I choose a different framework?"