E-Mail This Article to a Friend Nordic tracts New films from Scandinavia at the MFA BY PETER KEOUGH

Ingmar Bergman has long overshadowed the cinema of Scandinavia, but lately filmmakers from other Nordic countries have challenged the Swedish giant. Aki Kaurismäki from Finland, Fridrik Thór Fridriksson from Iceland, and Lars von Trier from Denmark, and Bergman actress Liv Ullmann from Norway have all maintained Bergman’s traditions of visual beauty, psychological introspection, meditative silences, and existential angst. They’ve added something distinctive as well. Not just the eccentricities of a personal style or a particular culture, but an element of levity, grace, or whimsy. Call it a sense of humor. Since the decline of Bergman, Scandinavian filmmakers haven’t forgotten that the human condition is one of tormented solitude bounded by the void. As can be seen in these two programs at the Museum of Fine Arts, the "Scandinavian Film Festival" and "The New Faces of Swedish Cinema," they’re learning to look at the lighter side of despair.

Norwegian director Bent Hamer pays a cockeyed homage to Bergman’s Persona with the opening of his slow-starting but ultimately delightful and moving Kitchen Stories (2003; 92 minutes; January 14 at 8 p.m.). The film goes off its sprockets and burns — what you’re seeing is, in fact, an industrial short about the Swedish Home Research Institute, a 1950s organization striving to streamline the Scandinavian dream home by testing wacky new products and observing the ergonomics of typical households.

The institute’s latest project is to study the homemaking behavior of single males in frozen rural Norway, and Folke (Tomas Norström) is one of several researchers posted in a high chair in a bewildered subject’s kitchen. His "host," Isak (Joachim Calmeyer), regrets volunteering for the study (he had been promised a horse; he didn’t know it would be a tiny, carved wooden one) especially since Folke, according to the rules of "positivistic" research, must remain absolutely silent and uninvolved while taking notes and drawing diagrams of Isak drinking coffee and staring into space.

It’s kind of a variation on the relationship between Ullmann’s attending nurse and Bibi Andersson’s mute patient in Bergman’s film as the artificial distance between the two men breaks down and they recognize that they are only two lonely souls in the middle of a frozen wilderness. Into this bleak prospect, however, Hamer injects an absurdist, deadpan absurdity reminiscent of Kaurismäki that makes even the film’s lapses into sentimentality seem bracing and true.

Danish director Christoffer Boe takes self-reflexivity one step farther in his much heralded (it’s the Danish nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar) Reconstruction (2003; 90 minutes; January 18 at 4:15 p.m.). It opens with August (Krister Hendricksson), a jaded novelist, describing the fiction to follow in a portentous voiceover reminiscent of Trier’s Zentropa. Alex (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), a photographer, rides the metro with his girlfriend, Simone (Maria Bonnevie). Without explanation, he slips away to follow, Aimee (Bonnevie again), a stunning stranger and, it happens, August’s wife.

Throw in a few references to Orpheus and add spy-satellite images used as transitional establishment shots and you have "That Obscure Project of Desire" or "Next Door at Marienbad." The film takes a welcome Kafkaesque turn in the middle when Alex finds that his apartment disappears and all of his acquaintances no longer recognize him, an anarchic element that, along with Bonnevie’s haunting performance, rescues the film from contrived pretentiousness.

Whereas Reconstruction probes the artifice of narrative, Finnish director Jarmo Lampela’s The River (2001; 107 minutes; January 28 at 8 p.m.) ponders the mystery of synchronicity and fate. In the tradition of knotted story lines from Short Cuts to 21 Grams and Elephant, the film traces a handful of simultaneous tales occurring within about an hour of real time and centered on a single uniting incident.

As local yokels in a small town take the plunge at a fair-ground bungee jump, an impoverished single mother ponders suicide, a high-school student confronts his homosexuality, a 60th birthday threatens to follow the catastrophic pattern of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, and an annoyingly chipper pizza-shop waitress blisses out over her new boyfriend. Lampela alternates moments of inspired eloquence with lazy clichés and never quite overcomes the programmatic concept.

Like The River, Swedish director Mikael Håfström’s Days like This (2001; 96 minutes; January 17 at 12:45 p.m.) links together disparate lives, in this case different households in an apartment building (not unlike the one in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog). The uniting device is Evert (Christian Fiedler), an aging vacuum-cleaner salesman who brings his tales of those he meets at work home to his ailing wife.

They include a variety of odd couples. Leif (Kjell Bergqvist) is a middle-aged neurotic with a stronger attachment to his stuffed squirrel than to his wife; Michel (Fares Fares) and his girlfriend, whose non-sequitur eccentricities pale before those of her parents when they pay a visit; and an elderly woman who relives her life with her late husband, a former clarinettist for a Nazi band, by climbing into a cupboard and shouting, "God is dead!" Evert’s wife suggests that he might be making some of this up, but the shaggy-dogness can have a funky, funny authenticity. Less convincing is the twist ending, which puts Days like This more in the same fiction/reality category with Reconstruction.

These themes of loneliness, powerlessness, and the inevitability of death reach a camp climax in Swedish directors’ Joel Bergvall & Simon Sandquist’s Invisible (2002; 95 minutes; January 21 at 6:15 p.m.). Its self-description as a cross between Ghost and Rebel Without a Cause would be fair if the former had been directed by Ed Wood and the latter by John Hughes. It also bears traces of D.O.A., Psycho, and Blackboard Jungle.

Niklas (Gustaf Skarsgård, Stellan’s son) is a star at his high school but can’t please his clingy, perfectionist mother, who wants him to get an economics degree and become a stockbroker. Niklas wants to run off to London and attend a writer’s program. Despite his talent and good grades, he’s without friends (except for Peter, an African immigrant, who is his Plato) and utterly alienated.

So too is Annelie (Tuva Novotny), who, dressed like a terrorist in a pilot hat and a face-concealing turtleneck, heads a gang of delinquents at the school. Busted by the cops, she suspects that Niklas was the one who turned her in, and with her henchman, she beats the crap out of him and leaves him for dead. Or maybe he is dead. When Niklas goes to class the next day to defend a poem he wrote from the critiques of jealous classmates, nobody can hear or see him. Talk about your teenage wasteland. After that, things get really silly; it all ends in one of the most bizarre reconciliation scenes you’ll ever see.

Annelie by far is the most appealing character in Invisible, and her rebellious spirit lives in the form of Minoo (an intense and witty Melinda Kinnaman), the spirited protagonist of Iranian/Swedish director Susan Taslimi’s All Hell Let Loose (2002; 88 minutes; January 16 at 6:30 p.m.). After several years in exile in America, Minoo returns to her Iranian émigré household for her sister’s wedding. Her dotty grandmother remembers her fondly, but her brutish dad bellows things like "If I was a real father, I would have cut your throat when that queer took your virginity!" Otherwise, he’s chasing his slacker son around with a butcher knife and threatening his wife with violence.

No Windex for him; call it "My Big Fat Iranian Abusive Father." Taslimi’s black comedy, however, has it all over Nia Vardalos’s ersatz product in its honesty, hilarity, and pain. Taslimi, a former actress in Iranian films, roots her comedy and melodrama in specific details, moral ambiguity, and an uncanny balancing of tone from broad comedy to shocking brutality. One of the best films in the series (the unfortunate title excepted), and proof that, having broadened their scope to include other Scandinavian countries, Nordic filmmakers can stretch their horizons farther still.