Singing in the Snow

The fishing port of Berlevag is about as far as you can get from anywhere, perching on the Barents Sea above the Arctic Circle in Finnmark, Norway’s northernmost county. Despite the remote location and frozen terrain, Berlevg has something to warm hearts across much of Europe — a 30-man amateur choral ensemble starring in a poignant and quirky film called Heftig & Begeistret, or Cool & Crazy.

Cool & Crazy, which has plucked the heartstrings of the Nordic countries and arrived to praise in Britain, is to open in the coming weeks in France, Germany and elsewhere. But hold on a minute. A documentary about a year in the life of the Berlevg Male Choir? In Norwegian, with subtitles? Wouldn’t watching icicles form be more interesting? Actually, no. This charming feature-length film by the Norwegian director Knut Erik Jensen is so full of warmth, humor, sensitivity, beauty, social commentary and stirring music that it will melt any negative preconceptions.

Among the most popular and financially successful Norwegian films ever, Jensen’s “documusical” has been lauded at numerous film festivals. One critic aptly dubbed it an Arctic version of Buena Vista Social Club, Wim Wenders’ 1998 documentary about a legendary group of Cuban musicians. “The people up here don’t take themselves too seriously,” says Jensen, himself a Finnmark native. “The farther north you go in Norway, the more Latin the mentality is.”

Indeed, there is a passionate and idiosyncratic center to Cool & Crazy. The men, aged 29 to 96, have let Jensen’s cameras get close, capturing their views on life and love in bathtub and bedroom interviews, at a feast of cod tongue and potatoes, at the local social security office (which “employs” much of the choir) and on a rollicking concert trip to Russia. They love the simple things that give their lives meaning — family, singing and home in an otherworldly region that is as far from Oslo as Oslo is from Rome. “Perhaps what you seek is in front of your eyes,” they sing.

Cool & Crazy has already mightily impressed the Swedes, who can be dismissive about anything Norwegian. “There is a lot of humor and a lot of love in the movie,” says Monika Tunbäck-Hanson, chairwoman of the Gothenberg Film Festival jury that named Cool & Crazy last year’s best Nordic film. “For city people,” she adds, “it’s an eye-opener to see humble people expressing their deepest thoughts so fluently. And in such a landscape!”

The film begins in a distinctly un-Latin blizzard in Berlevg, home to some 1,200 souls. On a headland facing the North Pole, the hardy ensemble solemnly belts out a robust ode to the forces of nature as icicles form on their whiskers. “Finnmark lad, you found your grave/Out on the awesome wave …” Their songs are interspersed, as the seasons change, with glimpses into individual lives. The men — among them an agnostic church organist, a reformed drug addict and a bellicose communist — are kindly and ornery, childlike and cynical, flirty and stern. The camera lingers over small details: as one man bemoans his political passivity, his kettle boils furiously. Jensen is an ennobler who cushions and elevates moments of personal vulnerability with footage of the whole choir performing its hymns and folk songs. “Every man is holy,” he says. “Every man is unique.”

As with the Cuban musicians in Wenders’ film, the Norwegians’ lives and history are entwined with their music. To Jensen, the chorus represents a vanishing group — hardy Norwegians who live off the sea and can sing without irony of ancestral “bearded heroes.” There is, notes producer Tom Remlov, “a political core to this film.” It has opened other Norwegians’ eyes, he says, to the fact that as fishing becomes big business and small fisheries and filleting plants close down, “the people who live in these communities are not being allowed to capitalize on the resources that they believe they rightfully own.”

For Jensen, the work was an affair of the heart from his very first encounter with the Berlevg Male Choir: “As I looked at them, with their faces marked by tough lives in the Arctic, giving themselves over to the poetry of these simple songs, I was very touched. The whole experience went straight to my heart and I felt tears in my eyes.” So, too, will many movie-goers who don’t understand a word of Norwegian.