Elling

CinemaSerf

There is certainly something of the odd couple here - maybe even the oddest of couples, as two men are thrown together by circumstance and state - and have to learn to live with each other. "Elling" (Per Christian Ellefsen) has reached the ripe old age of forty without ever having been untied from his now late mother's apron strings. "Kjell" (Sven Nordin) is an hulk of a man obsessed with girls but completely lacking in the tact or subtlety to ever manage to lose his virginity. Initially, the pair have to share a room in a government hostel where they begin to learn the basic skills of mutual toleration - and for "Elling" that proves to be quite a challenge. After a couple of years, they are deemed - like a couple of house-trained beavers - fit to be released into society and so are provided with a flat and a pension and left to get on with things. The thing is, it's not just his pal who is finding himself a touch hormonal and when the expecting "Reidun" (Marit Pia Jacobsen) hoves into view from the apartment upstairs, confusion reigns between the two men with one lovestruck and getting completely the wrong end of the stick and the other - well he just hasn't much of a clue what's going on. Now some of it is perhaps a little too rose-tinted, and the fact that these lads end up on their feet pretty much from the get-go does remove some of the grittiness and authenticity of living on the state sector, but then again I wonder if the purpose here is just to craft a human story uncomplicated by the negativities of red tape. Ellefsen's reminded me of so many other characters, but not so much as a mimic but more as a hybrid of a man very much on the OCD scale but largely unaware that he is any different from anyone else - except his permanently horny friend to whom he tries, in vain, to give sex advice. It doesn't hang about for ninety minutes and if you're prepared to take it on an entertaining face value then it's quite and enjoyable bromance with a difference.