Christmas in Blighty

So I am back in this, the land of my birth, to celebrate Christmas in my own atheist/capitalist way. I wish you all a very merry time of it and I will be seeing many of you over the next few weeks - I look forward to that! I will recommence writing in the new year with even more vigour as I commence my 3 month stint of pure Norwegian immersion before coming home at Easter (you've got to love these conveniently dispersed Christian holidays...).
Ha det!

Oslo Internasjonale Filmfestival 08

Oh what bliss! An excuse to go to the cinema every night! And what a lovely poster. The week began last Friday with W, Oliver Stone's biopic of George Dubya. It didn't really satiate my thirst for "world cinema" as we anglosaxons love to call it, but fairly good all the same. Though I felt it really failed as the cutting exposé of Bush's incompetency and fecklessness that it was billed as. It didn't feel like I'd been given a new insight into this story: it described what everyone has been banging on about during his whole presidency. Bush is dumb, we get it. It seems like Stone was trying to write history rather than make a film. He saw his opportunity, when all eyes were turned to the White House, to make his own contribution to this 21st century narrative.

My definite highlight of the festival was La belle personne, which has to be one of France's best offerings this year. It was a kind of high school drama à la française, i.e. featuring a melodramatic pupil-teacher love triangle which ends with suicide. The director Christophe Honoré attempted a loose adaptation of the 17th-century novel 'la princesse de Clèves' (I'm told) - I liked the way he managed to weave parts of the dialogue into the story, without seeming fake (to my naïve French ear, that is...). But most of all it had that quality which completely involves you in the story, and when you leave the cinema you feel like you're walking on air. In my imagination I am 17 years old, French, living in the 8e arrondissement and sitting in Italian class at my lycée, involving myself in the perfect affairs of the heart of my camarades.

But sadly, I'm sitting at the back of an English class, watching Norwegian teenagers watch a film. And it's so early, it's still dark outside. And no chance of a gauloise.

Life in the Grorud valley

I've had this post mulling around in my head for some time... well, about the amount of time in which I have been too lazy to post anything. It centres around my increasing urban malaise produced by living in a tower block in the nowhere part of town.
The Groruddal, as it is known, is a valley radiating from Oslo which is home to two major motorways, some heavy industry, shopping centres and countless tower blocks. Together with the weather at this time of year, this makes for a pretty grey urban atmosphere. The other day I heard a sort of squeaking sound from the window - I wondered for a moment if it was a bird, but it turned out to be the sunshade on the balcony, squeaking away happily. At that moment I realised this is the first place I have ever lived where you never hear birdsong. I got so used to living close to nature that I stopped noticing it, but now I'm living here it's one thing I really miss.
When the urban planners of the fifties and sixties dreamt up this 'machine for living', they really failed to consider that you can't live in a machine. Certainly not a country bumpkin like me!