Frosty treats

A cinematic smorgasbord

by Scott Heller

SCANDINAVIAN FILM FESTIVAL, At the Museum of Fine Arts, April 7 through 29.

In the last few years, Scandinavia has provided some of the freshest and most vibrant subtitled films to arrive here from anywhere. The delicious teen comedy Show Me Love, from Sweden, the moody police psychodrama Insomnia, and the slackfest Junk Mail, both from Norway, are gems.

I hoped for more of the same from the Museum of Fine Arts' Scandinavian Film Festival, which will screen 14 features and a documentary from five nations. Yet the movies I've watched don't deliver on this funky new promise. The most eye-catchingly youthful, Katrin Ottarsdottir's girls-on-the-road pic Bye Bye Blue Bird (April 22 at 2:15 p.m.), is utterly annoying. Pizza King (April 19 at 6 p.m.) at least has novelty value, bringing to the screen a criminal set of Arab and Turkish immigrants who're looking for the big score in lily-white Denmark. Then again, if your taste runs to luscious blondes (men, women, and lighting), costume dramas, and rich storytelling, the MFA's selection is definitely for you.

Or your kids. Scandinavia has become a world leader in films for young people, and the MFA program includes two Saturday-morning screenings that show why. The Glassblower's Children (April 29 at 10:30 a.m.), from Sweden, gussies up a moral fable with over-the-top sets and costumes reminiscent of recent TV fantasias like Gulliver's Travels and The Tenth Kingdom. It begins with every child's secret wish and every parent's hidden dread: what if you could trade in Mom and Dad for a new and more glamorous set? Little Klas and Klara get their wish at a local fair when they're scooped up and taken across the River of Forgotten Memories to an enchanted castle. Pernilla August, known to many adults from Best Intentions and to every kid from The Phantom Menace, plays their aggrieved mother. Stellan Skarsgård is the tormented dad. But the stars of the show are the castle's icy Queen and a hilariously obese nanny right out of Monty Python. When Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory gets its much-needed remake, it should look something like this.

You won't find Aksel Sandemose and Per Olov Enquist at the top of the Amazon.com bestseller charts. But in their home countries, these two novelists are beloved. And their meaty storytelling seems made for the movies. Director Nils Gaup's Misery Harbour (April 27 at 6 p.m.) is based on the life and work of Sandemose, who returned to the theme of small-town oppression in many of his writings. Here his hero trades in Jante, a dreary home town, for a fishing village in Newfoundland, only to find that an arch-rival won't let him forget his past. Shot mostly in English and starring a charismatic young actor named Nicolaj Coster Waldau, the film remains a poor cousin to the recent Dutch Oscar winner Character.

Although just as old-fashioned, The Magnetist's Fifth Winter (April 15 at 3:45 p.m.) is superb. Danish director Morten Henriksen freely adapts a 1964 novel by Enquist, a Swede, creating a juicy 19th-century medical melodrama about healers and quacks. A mysterious foreigner (Ole Lemmeke, looking oddly like Sandra Bernhard) appears in a small Swedish town promising to heal the infirm with magnetic powers that get stagnant fluids in the body flowing again. The town's senior doctor (Rolf Lassgård) is a confirmed skeptic. But when the stranger brings sight to the doctor's blind daughter (Johanna Sallström) and arrogantly announces he will set up a magnetism clinic, the sides are drawn all over again. Lemmeke is compelling and creepy, like a showy orchestra conductor with one eye on his next, bigger gig. His messiah complex comes to life in a stunning, candlelit scene of mass healing.

Instantly likable for his baggy-faced decency, Lassgård also stars in Colin Nutley's Under the Sun, which opens the festival in a blinding sunshine flash (April 7 at 7:45 p.m.). An Oscar loser last month for Best Foreign Film, Under the Sun is beautifully made and emotionally absurd -- which is why I was sure it would take home the statuette. Lassgård's Olof is a 40ish '50s farmer who hasn't recovered from his beloved mama's death nine years earlier. His much younger friend, Erik (Johan Widerberg), drives a racy roadster and sports a ducktail haircut with an Elvis complex. Then Ellen (Helena Bergström), a mail-order housekeeper, enters the idyllic picture.

Did I mention that Olof is illiterate? And a virgin? That Ellen, every inch the leggy sophisticate, falls in love with him? And has a taste for stand-up sex? In the barn? With lead performers this appealing, I could (almost) buy all that, and even the lilt-to-the-hilt music of Paddy Moloney, moonlighting from the Chieftains. But the baby-faced Widerberg kills any credibility as the third side to this triangle. More petulant brat than sensitive stud, he makes little sense as Olof's confidante, even less as his romantic rival.

Leave it to the dervish of deadpan, Finland's Aki Kaurismäki, to spin a truly captivating love story: Drifting Clouds (April 21, 8 p.m.). As downward mobility sets in, Ilona (Kati Outinen, the director's frequent muse) barely moves a muscle of her fabulous poker face. Her loyal husband (Kari Vaananen) hits the sauce. They lose jobs, and bookshelves, and dignity -- almost. Then their luck changes. Life is, indeed, beautiful. But with the flick of a switch it could turn dark again.

That's Scandinavia!