Thursday, October 11

Yesterday's lineup at the Cine Europa all had something to do with cars and motion.

The girls from Bye Bye Blue Bird return to their hometown wearing outfits fit for color-obssessed goth fans. Between them are the orange hair, the purple eyeshadow and lipstick, the platform boots and the Polaroid they constantly aimed at anything that moved or anyone they loathed. The objects of their amateur photography are various members of their estranged families. And we can all have a guess why they are not welcome in the wonderful Lego world of Faroe Island. The people of Faroe Island live in rolling hills and cute, simple houses made of Lego. If you put cows on those hills, they would be more pastoral than New Zealand.

Real Faroese never leave the island--they are never tempted to try out what lies out there. But that's precisely what drove the girls out of the cow and fish village. The other side of the fence held modelling careers and interesting guys that somehow never felt perfect enough, so here they are, trying to make peace with family who shun because they are either products of original sin, and want nothing to do with sinners. But they are Faroese, and they just had to take them back in, or forgive them for their original sins which they had no hand in anyhow, and let the girls go back into the world that they just had to conquer.

En route to achieving this Oprah moment, the girls had with them with sailor guy, Runi, who also had things to settle on his own. Each time they stopped at a village hall, he leaves the girls and comes back with a welcoming blackeye or bloodied lip. He too, has an issue to resolve: he used to own his boat and fish his heart out, but one drunken night, he sells the rights to his boat and he becomes somewhat of a slave. Nobody wants to have anything to do with a loser, so his wife runs away with his kid, and every boat owner on the island turns his away. They don't want a sailor who gets his pants pulled out from him while stone drunk. But Runi earnestly wants to sail out, but each foray into asking gets him beaten to a pulp. In the end, he is in a hospital, in a cast, eyeing what's left of his world from his window view of the island.

While Runi gets beat up, the girls launch into musical moments. They chance upon a fellow goth woman singing in a bar, and they dance. Runi stops his car on a cliff and they march up and down, arms pumping in the air, like a couple of stooges without the wig and the coveralls.

When they dance, all problems seem to dissolve: no abandonment issues, no progeny cursing them to hell, no handsome guy to alternately run away and run into bed with. It's just them girls, from the start of the movie where they held hands in a cab and till the end of their tearful tearful parting.

After all, Faroe Island is in the heart. Or something is rotten in the state of Denmark, or whatever.

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