Frozen

"When are you going to grow up?" our hero is chided.

101 REYKJAVIK directed by Baltasar Korm᫵r

with Victoria Abril, Hilmir Sn沠 Gudnason, and Hanna Mar��Karlsd�r runs Oct. 12-18 at Egyptian


JUST WHEN YOU protest, “No more slacker movies!” that seemingly exhausted genre is unexpectedly revived. A SIFF favorite from last spring, this oddball Icelandic feature does the trick nicely, despite excess voice-over narration (betraying its literary origin). Here, our resolutely lazy and jobless 28-year-old hero Hlynur (Hilmir Sn沠Gudnason) is still living with his divorced bohemian mother (Hanna Mar��Karlsd�r), who’s not above sharing a toke with her son.

Hlynur and his deadbeat pals live mainly to party. “I drop dead each weekend,” he intones—meaning that they get wasted on benefit checks, then drive home through icy streets on bald tires while peering through a tiny patch of defogged windshield. It’s a narrow worldview, as Hlynur glumly, ironically recognizes. In the grand tradition of whiny, self-pitying Gen-X heroes who obdurately sabotage their own potential, he both mocks and aggrandizes his idleness.

That all changes with the arrival of his mother’s Spanish friend and flamenco-dance instructor, Lola (Almod� vet Victoria Abril of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Kika, an unstoppable force of eros). Venturing into English, like much of Reykjav��s dialogue, they size each other up. “What do you do in life?” “Nothing.” “Nothing?” “The nothing kind of nothing.” Estranged from his haute bourgeois girlfriend, however, Hlynur isn’t above casual alcohol-fueled rutting with Lola—creating a vaguely incestuous romantic triangle with his own lesbian mother!

Ever the mama’s boy, Hlynur refers constantly to his childhood, making for several amusing flashbacks. (At the same time, we’re given several quick glimpses of the movie’s nearly climactic scene.) He’s a student of kitsch, a nihilist who hands cigarettes to children, yet also a closet altruist who puts change in other people’s parking meters (a nicely glancing reference to Cool Hand Luke).

Hlynur suffers other complications (mostly sexual), but the path to his inevitable redemption is saved from clich頢y the city of Reykjav��s weird fusion of ancient landscapes and modern rave- going kids. (Director Baltasar Korm᫵r is among them as Hlynur’s buddy Thr�r.) Handheld cameras push through endless, smoky, alcohol-fueled, and ridiculously overcrowded house parties, accompanied by a wonderfully and genuinely eccentric soundtrack by Blur’s Damon Albarn and the Sugercubes’ Einar ֲn that thumps and bleeps like a Moog synthesizer with a mind of its own. For those with a taste for gray-skied deadpan Nordic humor ࠬa Aki Kaurism䫩, 101 Reykjav��is just the right postal code.

bmiller@seattleweekly.com