Here Is Your Life

"Olof" (Eddie Axberg) is a fourteen year old lad who now has to work for a living - and that means manual labour in Norway's chilly forests at the bottom of the food chain. It's not that his family don't care, it's that his real (much older) father is terminally ill and his foster-family can't afford to keep him any longer - so a bunk in a cabin with some hardened gents prone to a glass and a rather pithy poem about working to buy drinks to drink until they run out of money and need go back to work again, becomes his new home. He doesn't exactly enjoy it, and when a tragedy strikes another teenage lad he decides it's time for him to move up, or maybe out, and into the bright lights of the city. It's here that he lands on his feet a little and gets a job working in a cinema. Initially, just donning an hat and showing folks to their seats but soon he is running the candle-lit projector before working with a touring company that takes the cinema into the more rural areas as the 20th century struggles through war. As he ages, his hormones start to make their presence felt and he encounters the well meaning, but troubled, hooker "Olive" (a powerful effort from Ulla Sjöblom) who sort of takes him under her wing - well under her duvet anyway. As his age approaches an adulthood that his mind had attained some years earlier, we incorporate more from the newsreels of the increasingly desperate situation during the Great War and see him fall into the company of some revolutionaries who are determined to fight for worker's rights - even if the workers themselves are less than interested in his propositions, especially when it comes to strikes that will keep food from the mouths of their kids. There is a subtle yet potent social commentary underpinning much of this as this young man sees little by way of opportunity, and I thought Axberg delivered really quite personably as his character's desires for rudimentary food, warmth and work start to evolve into the need for a more mature physical and mental fom of nourishment. The use of the cinema to show us silent movies and newsreels to help develop the timeline works well and there are also splashes of colour to help differentiate between his own rather tough and bleak life and some flashbacks - though these aren't neccessarily cheery moments from his life, either, so don't get your hopes up. It's gloomy, yes, but I thought it also real and with a solid series of supporting, sometimes quite pitiable, roles it's quite a captivating look at just how perilous the life of "Olof" and many like him was amidst the snows of a society that wasn't always the most caring.