My favourite films of the year are of a predominantly dark and twisted nature: Tyrannosaur begins with a rage-consumed alcoholic kicking his pet dog to death; Miss Bala follows the exploits of a beauty pageant contestant who becomes embroiled in gangland warfare; Snowtown delves deep into the sadistic affairs of Australia’s most notorious serial killer; and We Need To Talk About Kevin explores the repercussions of a maternal nightmare so heinous that even Polanski couldn’t fully embrace it. After leaving the screening of each one, I was forced to watch back-to-back Disney films for the next 24 hours to avoid a catatonic breakdown.
But my fifth favourite film, starring a middle-aged ice curling champion with a debilitating case of OCD, seems disproportionally more gleeful by comparison. And yet it never received anywhere near the level of acclaim the previous four attained. Maybe that’s because it’s not the style of ‘misery porn’ so adored by the vast majority of film critics who wish to seek assurance that their own solitary lives do not resemble such harrowing portraits of poverty and despair. Fortunately for me, this Norwegian tale of misadventure (King Curling) does not try to spoon-feed any profound moral lessons or emotional epiphanies, but instead boasts a series of vignettes which include father-and-son Rod Stewart impersonators, a permanently harassed Pepsi deliveryman, a set of poorly executed karate kicks directed at a group of bird watchers, and the most cringe-inducing pole dance in cinematic history. It’s certainly a film that requires a positive suspension of your critical faculties, but there is a strong focus on loyalty and friendship buried beneath such farce.
The plot follows Truls Paulsen (Atle Antonsen) and his eccentric friends on a mission to overcome adversity and win the curling championships – and more importantly the prize money – so they can pay for their childhood hero’s lung operation. So, it’s somewhere between Dodgeball and The Full Monty… on ice (and steroids). I admit that it’s a well-worm formula – a group of men pulling together to compete in a tournament – so no points to Ole Endresen for a screenplay that wholly conforms to the traditional loser-to-winner template, but structural originality is never the point when it comes to slapstick comedy. Instead, the film’s humour relies on bathetic excess, the characters intoning sentiments with immensely earnest gravitas about the inherently funny-looking sport they worship. Consequently, few of the lines are funny on paper; instead, it’s the way in which the thesps deliver them with such severely straight faces that puts the material across so well. The ensemble cast is uniformly excellent; Atle Antonsen, exhibiting a deep Jack Nicholson-esque disquiet, as the menacing Trul is a standout performance, along with Linn Skaber, who shines as his frustrated, slightly demented spouse.
Reminiscent of directors like Bent Hamer and Roy Andersson, the film is full of bizarre encounters and inanely happy colours, giving the whole flavour a bubblegum perkiness which befits the story and its characters. At one point I did get the overriding feeling that Endresen was trying to didactically convey a message about drug taking – specifically, that mood enhancing pills are society’s method of unnecessary, short-term comfort… but I swiftly eschewed this attempt at moral commentary in favour of laughing at a fat man being chased down a corridor.
In this comic sense alone, it is the perfect antidote to the trying-desperately-hard-to-be-profound Oscar fodder you’ll find in almost every cinema over the coming months. So let the film critics sneer all they like: King Curling may be shallow, outrageous and essentially Dodgeball’s freak of a cousin, but my god will it make you laugh.
