Elling · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The telephone rings in the little Oslo flat, and Elling does not answer it. He looks at it. Kjell Bjarne looks at him. Nobody moves. A ringing phone is the most ordinary object in the world, and for a few seconds the film makes it monstrous — a small machine demanding that a grown man do something he cannot do. Watch Elling's face during that pause and you have the whole picture, and a surprisingly exact instance of an idea the philosopher Gilles Deleuze spent two books building.

Deleuze split cinema in two. In most films — call it the movement-image — a character sees a situation and acts to change it; perception runs into action, and the cut serves that flow. The detective follows the clue, the cowboy draws. But Deleuze noticed that a different kind of film kept appearing, full of people who could no longer do this. They perceive a situation and discover they have no adequate response to it. They watch, they wait, they endure. He named the hinge between the two regimes the crisis of the action-image, and its protagonist the seer (voyant) — someone to whom the world arrives as a pure optical and sound situation, with no action available to discharge it.

Why bother with that vocabulary for a gentle Norwegian comedy? Because it explains why the comedy is funny. Elling takes the smallest tasks of citizenship — answering the phone, ordering in a café, walking down a street, speaking to a woman — and treats each as a heroic quest. The structure is a string of these ordeals, graduated like levels. In an action film, the hero meets the obstacle and overcomes it in the same gesture. Here the gesture is missing. Elling and Kjell Bjarne meet the obstacle and can only look at it. The ringing phone, the restaurant menu, the open door of the flat are opsigns and sonsigns: situations that are all perception and dread and no act. The film mines its laughter and its tenderness from exactly the gap Deleuze described — the gap between what these men can see and what they can do.

Notice where Svein Krøvel's camera goes. It holds on faces. The film is paced to let the dread gather before each encounter, and what gathers is legible in tiny movements — the swallow, the flinch, the bracing. Deleuze would call this the affection-image, and more precisely the potisign, the threshold face on which an intensity builds without yet breaking into action. The held beat before Elling lifts the receiver is a whole drama compressed into a contour of skin. Around these faces the city turns hostile. Oslo is photographed not as a place but as an ordeal, vast and exposing from Elling's agoraphobic point of view, while the cramped flat is staged as a closed world that is both refuge and trap. This is the any-space-whatever — space that has stopped being a stable setting for action and become a charge of pure feeling, threat outside, shelter within.

Then there is the film's real invention, the thing that keeps it from being merely a well-made two-hander: the voice-over. We hear Elling narrate his own life in grand, self-dramatizing, would-be-poet prose, and we watch a timid man do almost nothing. Sound and image tell two different stories — an audiovisual disjunction played for comedy and for ache. Deleuze had a name for what that narrating voice is doing. Not lying, exactly. Fabulating — caught in the act of legending himself, talking a braver self into existence one sentence at a time. The voice forges the man the body cannot yet be, and the film's quiet wager is that the forgery slowly comes true: the mailed poem, the word spoken to a stranger.

And it is a film of bodies. The whole drama is staged as a two-character choreography — Ellefsen's compact, fussy, contained physicality against Nordin's looming bulk, blocked again and again around doorways and thresholds. These are gests in Deleuze's sense: postures that expose a social relation, here the rehabilitation contract that says become a citizen or go back inside. The body carries the meaning the dialogue is too frightened to state.

The craft is borrowed, and honestly. The male dyad of a small verbal protector and a large gentle innocent comes straight from Of Mice and Men; the single-apartment, mismatched-temperament engine from The Odd Couple; the patient, performance-led humanism from Marty; the institution-and-rehabilitation comedy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; the two social incompetents adrift in an overwhelming city from Midnight Cowboy; the let-the-acting-carry-it portrait of mental difference from Rain Man. Elling refuses every formal flourish of its Dogme 95 neighbours and stays smoothly conventional on purpose.

That refusal is the argument. The picture proves you do not need the austerity of an art film to put the time-image's seer on screen. You can fold the broken action-image, the any-space-whatever, and the fabulating voice into warm, popular comedy and have them work better for being invisible. Watch it again for the pauses. The film lives in the second before Elling acts — the held breath where a man who cannot move decides, this once, to move anyway.