Børning, pronounced 'burning', is marketed as "Norway's first car film". Whether that's true or not I can't tell you, but by just looking at the film you'd think they'd made quite a few more before. I'm normally not a big fan of car films, I'm not really a fan of cars at all, but the concept has always interested me. It seems like such an odd thing to make a film about to me, even though I know the cultures surrounding cars are quite diverse and expansive. Earlier this year I watched "Need for Speed", mostly because it was the only half-interesting new film out that week, but also because I wanted to see what exactly the genre was all about. I found it to be surprisingly good. Not an amazing film by any means, but quite fun and entertaining enough to keep me invested. Invested enough that I remembered the trailer attached to it for several months, that was the first time I watched the trailer for Børning.
I never really thought it would take off as much as it did. But Børning has been one of the films I've heard people talk about the most these past couple of months, even more so than Guardians of the Galaxy. Don't get me wrong, it's not all been good talk. Most of what I've heard has actually been rather negative. People saying it looks stupid and unfunny, mostly from people who don't watch a lot of films that aren't either American or British. And then there's the odd person who says it just looks fun, and might be good for a laugh. It therefore came as a big surprise to me when I ran into the theatre a few minutes late, in the middle of a trailer, and found the theatre was completely full. There was maybe two or three seats available at the front row on the outermost edges, but all the other seats were taken. I've never seen that before. The closest I've been was maybe at the midnight premiere of Catching Fire last year, but even that had a few empty seats here and there.
The audience sounded like they enjoyed the film as well. Laughing at the right times, and staying quiet when needed. Apart from an outbreak of laughter in response to a little girl commenting "Dad, this film is pretty boring" there was little to be heard. And too be fair, the little girl was right. At that particular moment the film was pretty boring. There were long stretches throughout the film where all we got to watch was footage of the cars driving up and down roads. Many of the clips didn't even have music, just the sounds of the engines. Which made for some pretty awkward pauses. Suddenly you could hear the people in the theatre coughing, you could see some people leaning closer together to comment on something, it just put a hold on the whole experience. Luckily when they managed to get out of the stretches of boredom it was quite entertaining. The characters were genuinely funny, the situations they got into were believable enough for it not to turn into a complete slapstick film, and it looked beautiful. The imagery was one of the best parts of the film. Not just getting to watch all the nature they're driving through, but how it's framed, how it was staged, how the colours interacted with each other. It was just nice to look at. Unfortunately due to some budgetary constraints they managed to ruin some of the aesthetics at times by swapping cars for CG models. It wasn't particularly well done, and really took me out of the scene. But luckily it was just in a handful of scenes, so it didn't bring the entire experience down.
The soundscape was a bit all over the place. Like I mentioned above, sometimes all we had were the sounds of engines and tires. Good sounding engines and tires, but they became awkward within the whole picture. But at other times again the sounds were just amazing. The music fit neatly together with the action, the cars sounded wonderful, and it sounded like a lot was going on even if it was a relatively quiet segment. There were some problems with the dialogue at times, though. Where the sound of the characters' voices got overdone by the other sounds, which was made even weirder when there's an exact scene where that sort of thing is supposed to happen, but they actually managed to mix it in such a way that it just sounded like the voices where drowned out, even though you could actually hear them through everything. It was a bit like they had a team of people working on it who were all on very different steps of their creative ladders, some where just a lot further along than others.
Overall I liked this film. It wasn't the best I've ever seen, but it was far from the worst. I'm already looking forward to watching it again when the home release drops, see if there's anything I missed, or just if it's even half as entertaining at home as it is in a theatre filled with people. If you manage to somehow get your hands on it, I'd recommend it. Don't expect a masterpiece, but it's at least a fun ride.
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