meteor shower Christmas, over time detached from its essence and endowed with consumer and stupid-sentimental colors, steps through the kingdom of blue. Now this day is ruled by a tree hung with garlands, happy children, disemboweling gifts under it, family unity and a suspicious-looking bearded grandfather in a red coat (the color is variable). A day when reality is kicked by a fairy tale and thrown out into the cold until the worst of times. But in the cold Scandinavian lands, the severity of the long winter leaves its mark, and this deviation from being is felt more strongly and with particular irony. The theme of Christmas Eve in the provincial Norwegian “Bedlam” is generally questionable for fun, and, according to expectations, the comedy in “Falling Heaven” multiplies the shades of black, sometimes up to the color of crude oil, like a pensioner pulling on a leash the corpse of a dog that did not wait for help, but at the same time, dilutes the darkness with light streams and non-standard gags.
The hospital itself is surprisingly liberal and somewhat reminiscent of a sad sanatorium, patients are quite able to leave its walls, there is no increased control over their behavior. Probably, in Norway it is easier, and in principle violent among patients is not noticed, but still for our viewer, implicitly waiting for a more hardcore attitude, it looks rather unusual. For the local mentally ill, such an important holiday is rather just another immersion in inner loneliness, and here they are not much different from those “normal” who surround them. In fact, the film is primarily about attempts to overthrow spiritual isolation and find a close soul under the vault of the starry sky. Numerous questions “Crazy?” rather sound like a search for their own kind, or vice versa, the desire to present their relative deviation as a common phenomenon, if everyone around a little, but crazy.
The main line of the story is a slightly naive story about the nascent feelings between two patients. He is a shy and nervous Reidar, afraid of meteorites falling from the sky and bringing destruction, trying to throw a tennis ball through the wall and seeing a bit of his guilt in everything. She is endowed with a considerable boxing talent of Yuni with suicidal tendencies, does not tolerate physical touch. Both lost touch with the family. Yuni’s respectable parents, tired of their daughter’s antics, move further and further away from her and go on Christmas holidays alone. Reidar’s mother, disappearing further into the abyss of senile insanity and paranoia, begins to see in her son a conspirator against her, who wants to lock her up in a nursing home and practically puts him out the door. Traditional, sometimes tough, story about the lights of souls attracted to each other by the gusts of the life wind.
Around them, in sometimes funny, sometimes dramatic combinations, the fates of other actors are intertwined. Of course, they have a brood of cockroaches, and it would be strange if a film about mentally ill did without colorful characters. The director of a mental hospital, so pathologically fixated on work that there is no room for his wife. His wife is looking for pleasure in the arms of a crooked taxi driver, while her husband is infantilely spying under the windows. A psychotic immigrant from Burma, fleeing the prospect of deportation and suffering from the not-so-successful scam of the aforementioned taxi driver. Numerous storylines are well spelled out, but sometimes overload the movie, knock the rhythm, although not so much that would finally break the puzzle. Characters, not just those that are painful, sometimes act against the expected logic. Perhaps this corresponds to the chosen concept, but the rhetorical question “For what?” no, no, and will emerge.
The fairy tale, as you know, should end well, but the authors’ sense of humor does not want to give out rainbow glasses. Instead of genre templates, the dying “Life is only a short moment”, sung during a fire, “happy” fireworks, bringing insurance to a girl left without savings, an accidental sacrifice that led the heroes to the right place for rock, and instead of a romantic kiss, the classic right straight in the nose. There will be a small miracle that violates the laws of physics and, of course, the banner of hope for the best will rise over all (even corpses).