This is also the international title for excellent
Norwegian movie "
Når nettene blir lange" directed and written by
Mona J. Hoel. It can be said it is yet another
Dogma 95 movie but especially first 30 minutes are so well cut that you have to like even if you don't care about Dogma in general. There are moments the movie loses its touch but I think the actors aren't too bad and it paints pretty good picture of problems of the family. Someone who has never been in
Norway may find it also
culturally interesting: Who the hell are going to go
in the middle of nowhere (but loads of snow) for Christmas? But that's how it is in
Scandinavia: whereas an American buys an expensive third car Scandinavians invest in a
cottage in the middle of nowhere. From that point of view, unfortunately only few shots of nature have ended in the film most of the movie taking place inside the small cottage. No doubt the scenes of the nature would have been astonishing.
The plot in short:
A family is going to the mountain for their christmas vacation, in a rented cabin. Problems occur on Christmas Eve when the father gets drunk and his alcohol problem comes to show. We get to learn a lot about the family's background, and the skeletons are surely taken from closets. If you look behind the curtain, they've got a whole other story to tell than what it looks from the outside. Father is an alcoholic, grown up daughters cannot have babies and one of them was dumped by her fiance recently, mother stayed with the father only for the kids. They are yelling all this out and only reasonable person is Stanislaw, the husband of one of the daughters, Liv. Add Stanislaw's parents who don't understand the word of Norwegian.. and even Stanislaw's father tells him about the awful memory of war. The vacation is cut short on the second day - everyone has had enough.