Snow and cold temperatures are the constants in Iceland. The winds sometimes blow the white stuff in drifts so high people have to dig themselves out of their homes. There is an ethereal quality to the sight of snow falling during dark evenings when only the moonlight accentuates its lazy descent to the ground. All this, of course, can make the inhabitants of this place adverse to getting up and going outside.
But the snow is only one of Noi's (Tomas Lemarquis) problems. This rebellious teenager lives with his grandmother (Anna Fridriksdottir), who likes to do jigsaw puzzles the size of a table. On a morning when he’s late for school, she casually gets a rifle and startles him out of bed with a gunshot out of his window.
Noi is a smart kid, as a school psychiatrist learns when he tests his intelligence. But he isn’t interested in his studies so he arrives late everyday and sometimes even sleeps during class. When he sends a tape recorder as his substitute, one of the frustrated teachers tells the principal that either Noi is expelled or he will resign. Meanwhile, Noi visits a cranky bookshop owner who tells him to stay away from his daughter, Iris (Elin Hansdottir), who is taking a break from the pressures of city life by working at the gas station. This is one of the places Noi frequents. He has figured out how to rig the slot machine there and get enough spare change to purchase a beverage.
Noi asks Iris out on a date, and they wind up in a local museum looking at a map. She says they should run away together. By chance, he picks Hawaii on the map. For his birthday, his grandmother gives him a stereopticon viewer with a beach picture with palm trees and the ocean in the background. It’s obvious Noi desperately yearns to escape Iceland.
This is the feature film debut of Icelandic writer and director Dagur Kari, and it is tailor-made for those who have a penchant for quirky coming-of-age stories rich with local color. The most interesting relationship is between the rebellious boy and his taxi-driving father, Kiddi (Throstur Leo Gunnarsson), who dispenses ideas on how to woo women when he drinks, which he does frequently. This middle-aged man's greatest fear is that his son will turn out like him. Noi's grandmother, who is also worried about his future, sends him to a fortune teller who gives him some disturbing news about what lies just around the bend. Noi decides to act on his yearning to escape Iceland, and the consequences are both comic and quaint. The surprising finale is appropriately mysterious with several possible interpretations.
The DVD extras include a 20-minute "making of" featurette, three deleted scenes, and the theatrical trailer.
