Fra balkongen (2017)

Review

Filmmaker Ole Giæver (Mot naturen) offers his musings on life and some personal philosophy accompanied by hi-res home videos of his family of four. It's an unusual format, arguably for a reason, but it's not the format that makes Fra balkongen a rather excruciating and mostly unrewarding experience – it's the slightness of Giæver's observations and the film's underwhelming visuals and compositions. Revisiting date-stamped VHS home videos from the early 1990s might have some sort of obscure anthropological value, but hardly for the audience of this movie. If nothing else, the picture is well aware of its smallness – it positively basks in it – but the glimpses of artistic value are too few and far between to make it all worthwhile. Most of them pop up when Giæver takes a broader perspective and ponders the universe and his place in it. But when he tries to weave his own everyday routines into it all in essayistic fashion, he reveals little else than his own trite ambition. Alas, Giæver is no Knausgård. And he is no visualist either. There's a sense of uninspiring triviality to the many universal but often banal truths he presents here.