Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen’s corrosive look at contemporary Norwegian society is also a hilarious and provocative comedy that cuts across class lines and rampages through notions of good taste, as it follows an ex-soldier and a single mother who go into the prostitution business after getting kicked off welfare.
A corrosive look at contemporary Norwegian society, Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen's The Immoral may also be one of the funniest, most provocative comedies you'll see this year. Cutting across class lines and rampaging through notions of good taste, it sketches a harsh portrait of a society completely dominated by unleashed, insatiable ids.
The ostensible heroes are William and Camilla. A veteran of the armed forces, William comes from a family of rootless nomads. Single mother Camilla hails from a lower-middle-class family, one she no longer speaks to. Kicked off welfare, the pair hightail it to the countryside to hide from the police. But William soon tires of this and convinces Camilla, a former prostitute, to get back in the game. Soon, they've set up shop in a ritzy villa whose only inhabitant is teenage Anders, a perma-stoned wannabe rapper desperate for sexual experience who becomes completely enamoured with his new houseguest Camilla. Circling around the group is used car salesman Rune — the auto industry's nightmare poster child. For a while it all kind of works, but, sure enough, cracks eventually begin to show.
Reminiscent of Lars von Trier's The Idiots (minus the exclusively bourgeois milieu and all that performance-art jazz), The Immoral is punctuated by florid animation illustrating the characters' half-baked, pop-fuelled dreams. It pushes boundaries relentlessly, right up until the final chilling shot.
STEVE GRAVESTOCK
Screenings
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