Recovered Classic: Junk Mail


Norwegian cinema is hardly noted for its contribution to film history, but director Pal Sletaune’s debut offering threatened to change all that. Shot in just eight weeks and winner of the 1997 Critics Week Prize at Cannes, Junk Mail rapidly made a name for itself as a festival favourite and proved that there was more to Scandinavian moviedom than a certain Ingmar Bergman.
Entitled Budbringeren in its Native tongue, Junk Mail is a viciously black comedy about a filthy, smelly, hovel-dwelling postman who gets caught up in the aftermath of a violent crime and gains possession of some serious money, which results in him running for his life.

Of course, when we first meet Roy (Tim Roth lookalike Robert Skjaerstad) dying a horrible death seems too good for him, because the disheveled and thoroughly unpleasant chap has a habit of opening people’s mail and dumping the letters he can’t be bothered to deliver in a railway tunnel. But when he finds a bunch of keys and opts to snoop around the apartment of a woman called Line (a deaf laundry worker and subsequent object of his desires), he gets more than he bargained for.
On the face of it it’s no more than he deserves, but while Roy is admittedly the laziest and most inept mailman on the planet, Skjaerstad portrays him as a curiously likeable guy and the character kind of grows on you as he pursues the woman of his dreams. That he carelessly gets himself into two scrapes that ultimately have people wanting to beat the living daylights out of him merely adds to the entertainment value.

Set in some of Norway’s most dreary locations, director Sletaune, who co-wrote the script, threads his short movie through a series of serious issues but always keeps the tone bleakly comical, channeling the lighter moments and dashes of dark humour through the character of Roy, whose pig-sty of an apartment, eating habits and sanitary regime have to be seen to be believed.
The director also allows his stark visuals to dominate early on, his pictures telling a thousand words as large chunks of the action pass by without any dialogue, the viewer ultimately having to juggle both the comic and tragic elements of the story’s everyday absurdities.

But for such a short film, Steaune manages to cram a whole lot in and draws commendable performances from his two leads, as well as chief villain Per Egil Aske, who is obviously a very dangerous man, but he’s also something of a buffoon. Deadly, but a bit too dim to be frightening.
Something of an unexpected delight, Junk Mail is exactly the sort of film Hollywood tends to joyously unearth and throw inordinate amounts of money at in order to shoot a remake. But as is often the case, the original simply can’t be improved upon (even if Roth is a shoe-in for the lead role) and it’s best left well alone.

After all, how could you possibly resist a film which the director himself describes as: “A black comedy about love, money that no one wants, cold canned spaghetti, karaoke, involuntary good deeds, rutting and the joy of being comatose.”?

David Lichtneker

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