En håndfull tid (1989) User Reviews

Beutiful film

[kkrogstad · 5 June 2001]

This film actually runs 92 minuttes. Martin Asphaug won an Amanda for best norwegian film, and Camilla Strøm Henriksen won an Amanda for best female actress in "En håndfull tid" at the Norwegian international film festival.

Martin Asphaug uses all kinds of camera tricks, set-ups, fades, to tell two parallel stories about Old Martin (Espen Skjønberg), portraying the character of today, and young Martin (Nicolai L. Nilsen) as the same character 50 years earlier. The director uses the main charcters Altzheimers syndrome, and the fact that he is talking to his wife Anna all the time, to show us his memory of his time with Anna. The film`s POV of the character shows a young man who has just lost his father in a car accident, and goes to the west of Norway to buy some horses in the end of fall. He must take along a young girl, who has problems with her violent father.

The story of today tells about the character 50 years later, wanting to go to Anna. He escapes from his nursing home, going to the west of the country.

This is a funny movie. The two main charcter are today playing lead roles in very popular tv-soaps in Norway. The seriousness of the caracteres is absent because of this. The film is made almost in the same way as "The French Lieutenant's Woman", from (1981) in the way the two stories are bound together.

One of the worst Norwegian films I have seen, and I've seen many...

[arvid-kleppe · 2/10 · 2 January 2006]

For some reason, unknown to me, this very early product of Norwegian director Martin Asphaug's, who since has moved to Sweden and directed a number of first-rate thrillers and more or less straight and very good "who-dun-its", has been considered a "classic", and is being revived on Norwegian TV-channels every one or two years. In my opinion, the sooner forgotten, the better...

The story (or stories, since are three or four or five which are interwoven and intertwined) is impossible; the acting varies from the almost competent to the downright awful, with a few very respectable attempts in minor parts, where some good actors have been placed; the filming of major parts of this looks more like a slide presentation or a series of glossy postcards. I'm sorry, but this is one of the few times I've fallen asleep more than three times in a cinema! To be woken up whenever somebody was killed, molested, raped or screamed when giving birth. Which happens from time to time - far too often, in fact. And the two or three nude scenes - wellll!!! - I even slept through those until someone was raped or killed or both.

The film starts almost farcically, then converts to a tragic comedy (or comic tragedy) in an old people's home. It continues as a drama, when the main character (an old man) escapes from the place, and starts wandering. And wandering he does - all of the well-nigh two hours (they seem like three!) that the film lasts - most of the film taking part in his head, where he relives The Story of His Life: clichèridden, often quite gruesome, more often embarrassingly amateurish in execution, and with strange and quite inexplicable episodes that seem to be taken from some other film with a totally dissimilar plot. Then the whole thing ends as a really awful melodrama, worthy of very early Victorian plays in that genre, or even the Paris boulevard theatres before that. Or, for that matter, may seem to cram 100 episodes of a really awful soap opera into one hour and thirtyseven minutes.

Some of the unfortunate lines in the film have become quotation party-pieces for us who don't like it (= hate it!!!), and we are in fact actually quite a few. One unfortunate line, which can be roughly translated from Norwegian as "The eagle taketh no children" (spoken in a pseudo-western-Norwegian lisping dialect) is repeated at too many regular intervals, to give a the film a "feeling" of drama (ugh!!!) and of continuity... That and other golden quotes had parts of the 1990 unfortunate cinema audience in helpless hysterics. And some us still laugh, now, after 15 years...

I would rate this as a three-minus or two-plus, and have decided on the latter. The former could have been defended on the basis of Susannah York being her usual beautiful self in a tiny cameo part. But this, I'm afraid, is outweighed by the awful acting of senior Norwegian actor Espen Skjønberg. And to this day I do not understand what or who persuaded (and paid for) Ms. York and Nigel Hawthorne to appear in this drivel.

Living myself in Western Norway, I hate to see really great and quite spectacular scenery be turned into a back-drop curtain of dubious quality. Seen through the eyes of someone from Eastern Norway (i.e. Oslo) the West-country scenes may look convincing. For us actually living here it is at best laughable - at worst insulting.

I don't know whom to blame the most: screenplay writer, director or whoever had the unthankful job of pasting this piece of dreadful rubbish together. The film, by any standards, should have sunk into oblivion as many (much better) other Norwegian films seem to have done.

Why do I write this??? I've seen it several times over the years, trying to find some redeeming features (in vain!), and to understand why it has become a national treasure. I still laugh, and I still cannot understand why this film has been taken so seriously, and for so long.