Budbringeren

(Junk Mail)

A film by Pal Sletaune (Norway, 1997),

with Robert Skajaerstad, Andrine Saether, Per Egil Aske, Eli Anne Linnestad.

Winner of the Mercedez-Benz Prize at the 1997 Cannes International Critics Week.

Roy is a postman who doesn't give a damn about anything in his routine life: he lives in a filthy apartment, eats junk food, only delivers the mail he wants to -after he sometimes read them- and gets rid of the rest... Until the very day when he breaks into a young woman's apartment after she forgot her keys in her mailbox...

Junk Mail can not be boxed up: it's half-way between the bitter-sweet comedy and the film noir genre. Everything is sad and dull in Junk Mail: the city, the weather, the characters' lives, the story... Yet, there's something truly magical in the dialogs and the situations that transcends that depressing atmosphere and makes the whole film undoubtedly unique. A bit like the Coen brothers' Fargo, Junk Mail is both tragic and self-deriding, which accounts for the characters' likeablenesses. The cast is extremely convincing to that effect. It's a pity such a jewel need to struggle hard to get a chance to reach the theatrical audience. The current movie system indeed doesn't allow small-budget films -especially from unusual countries such as Norway- to make a hole in the cloud of Hollywood superproductions in spite of "some" of the latters' questionable qualities.

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