As Good As It Gets

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Magnificent scenery, including lots of snow, superior acting, and moving camera by director George Schnéevoigt all make the involved story set in the frozen wastes of Scandinavia absolutely enthralling.Accompanied by a score (produced by the prolific Robert Israel) of piano reductions of music from Grieg, "Laila," as presented on Turner Classic Movies on 22 November 2015 -- remember we in California are hours behind most of these United States, the Eastern Time Zone of which saw it on Monday morning, 23 November -- presented a picture of a life so foreign to me, and probably most of us, that it could have been done badly and still be mesmerizing.Frozen wastes, reindeer, strange alphabet, ravenous wolves, life lived on skis, and funny-looking hats just made "Laila" all the more intriguing."Laila" is as good as and often better than any Hollywood production, and I am puzzled as to why we haven't seen more films from Norway.Above all, watch the marvelous bodily and facial expressions to see some superlative acting.Especially watch Mona Mårtenson in the title role: She is beautifully athletic as the Lapp girl, and she and the other three young adults in particular are very attractive besides.And Mona Mårtenson has one of the most expressive faces I have ever seen. She alone would make this movie worth watching again and again.To sum up, this is an extremely well done look at a culture so different, it is downright alien, but utterly fascinating. I very highly recommend "Laila," for frequent viewings.Two words recur you will want to research: "Finnmark" and "daro." When you understand them, watch "Laila" again with improved understanding

I caught the second half of this move late at night on TCM. I really enjoyed the beautiful scenery of the Lapp people and their folk costumes. The vistas behind the actors was breathtaking. I also enjoyed watching how integral the reindeer was in their culture. They reindeer pulled the sleds and pulled the people on skies. They showed the dwellings of the Lapp people and a traditional wedding. I live in Southern California, so I have never seen anything like this. Most exciting was knowing that nothing was computer-generated like today. It was a wonderful glimpse into the past. The plot, though a little thin and a bit predicable compared to today's films, was still interesting and moved quickly enough to keep interest.

This is one of the first chances anyone has had to see this film in a proper condition in living memory. It played at the renowned Pordenone silent film festival last year and happily made it to London this. It was restored in the seventies for Norwegian TV, but it was played at the wrong frame rate, so folks were seeing a 165 minute movie in 120 minutes (and with subtitles instead of intertitles!), which was obviously a mockery.The film is about a baby called Laila who we see grow into a little girl and finally a young woman during the film. She lives an exciting nomadic life with the whole tundra her playground. She is played by Mona Mårtenson, who is a wonder to behold. The movie is a drama of faces, there is a number of hugely expressive faces in the film, and all you can do is sit there and take in their radiance and pure joie de vivre. Mona for example really is a damned livewire, it's all she can do to stop bursting out of her skin, happiness is written all over her face. With silent film it really does help if you have expressive actors, and they hit the jackpot of them with this movie.There's a lot of racial subtext in this movie which is mined as a source of amusement more than anything else (the film occasionally sails provocatively close to the wind in terms of racism). Apart from Laila's scrapes with death the film is a love story where Laila has to choose between a Finn and a Norwegian. Laila is a woman caught between two cultures, she is ethnically Norwegian but gets brought up with Sami (called Lapps in this film) who are the indigenous people of Finnmark. I think folks watching the film mistook Finnmark to be a concoction of Finland and Denmark, used to introduce a location nonspecifically (judging from the tittering). However it is the province at the very top of Norway, the Far North Eastern tip. Here the Sami people traditionally live off reindeer herding, and in fact you now have to be Sami in order to profit from reindeer husbandry in Norway by law. So they are a nomadic people, as opposed to the Norwegian's who lived off farming and trade via the fjords.Sami are generally distinguished in this movie in that they wear a traditional ciehgahpir (which is a Four Winds Hat, a pretty particoloured chapeau, not too dissimilar to a jester's hat). They are a damned lively bunch, whose favourite pastime, hilariously, is lassoing. It was guaranteed to get a laugh from the audience every time Laila decided to lasso something.The two main Sami men in the movie are the loyal Jåmpa and the rich man Aslag Laagje. Seeing those two I was strongly reminded of Frans Hals portraiture and Dreyer's film Der van engang (1922). A couple of lusty fellows with epic eyebrows who lead a nomadic life of wolf hunting and reindeer herding. The light of their life is Laila, their happiness continually bound to her fortunes.The flavour of this epic movie is the joie de vivre previously alluded to. There's a positive joy associated with the presence of children and with mere existence that simply is no longer possible to capture at this point in time. It's a cynical world we have now where folks have to worry about events and processes that are far beyond their control, and it's no longer clear why we bring children into the world.For nearly three hours though the audience forgot about that and revelled in the entertainment. It's a measure of the sheer good-naturedness of the film that when the melodrama comes along towards the end of the film, even though it's almost absurd, you're carried along willingly.I only wish I could have watched it with my dog so she could have barked at the wolves. Yes there really is something for everyone here.

Not laden with the obvious and overstated national romanticism in the pictorial compositions as a few of its Norwegian contemporaries (most notably Rasmus Breistein's "Brudeferden i Hardanger", 1926), this film displays a certain freshness unusual for Norwegian films to date. Part of this fact is probably due to having a Dane direct in the relatively harsh conditions of northern Norway (mostly) during winter. Another factor is the very lively Mona Mårtensson as Laila, although she appears in the second half of the film, which is inferior to the first due to its rather melodramatic turn. Slipping at times into theatrical overacting, Mårtensson still mostly conveys the liberating, semi-naive and cut to the chase-attitude of Laila on the verge of adulthood torn between two cultures and mind sets: If one is to over-determine, the best of her performance is very liberating in the way it shows Laila as an improvising individual in her encounters with the Norwegians at the trading post, putting up the face of nomadic same culture penetrating and breaking the ice of the western European respectively. The editing of the film also serves up some (for is time, ontologically) very good disposing of the story, as we the viewers in some vital situations are held in suspense through a sort of reverse dramatical irony, not being told things in the right chronological order. The nature of this is not filmically complex, but it has a peculiar (unintended?) effect of enhancing the broader existential feel of the plot. As when the baby Laila's crib is first found empty, suggesting to us and the mother that she has been taken by the wolves, BEFORE we are told in a flashback who has really found her, which is of course STILL OBSCURE to the mother.As a final note, this film was recently screened at the Cinematheque in Oslo at its right speed of 16 fps., making it both comfortably realistic and a good 2 hours and 40 minutes long, which is certainly felt towards the end, when melodrama peaks. Note how the character Mellet disappears out of the film, slightly out of focus in the back of the picture, walking out of the frame behind the kissing couple. Very sad, and at the same time sort of reminiscent of the implications of Welles' much acclaimed depth-of-field revolution 12 years later...