YOU REALLY GOT ME

P?l Sletaune, director of the Norwegian cult hit “Junk Mail” (22nd CIFF, 1998), serves up another helping of dark comedy, a tangled tale of misfortune and its fools, noble losers and their persecutors scattered throughout the disreputable backstreets and drab housing-estates of Oslo. Jan, ever-hopeful but failure-prone proprietor of a dying fast-food burger joint, is reduced to borrowing money from his scornful and exasperated girlfriend, when he isn't being berated by his useless horror of a father. Meanwhile, Bent is the downtrodden drummer for a popular rock band, whose egomaniacal front man Ivor Mo gets all the attention (including that of Bent's fickle lover). One night when it seems like things can't get any worse for Bent and Jan, two incompetent thugs appear on the scene to abduct Ivor Mo. The pair nearly kill themselves in the process and dump the superstar, helpless and in danger of starvation, in a cabin. Jan, of all people, happens to find Ivor, but the prospect of profit turns the would-be rescuer into a co-conspirator in the Kidnapping of the Century ? well, the century's still young. YOU REALL GOT ME unites a pathetic combo of victims and parasites in an oft-hilarious farce of rotten luck and mischance. (In Norwegian with English subtitles)