User Reviews

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

It offers some stunningly beautiful landscapes, a slow, relaxing pace, and charmingly shaky camera work, but the narrative can't quite support the weight of its lofty ideas. Gavagai is structured like a road trip but the two main characters don't talk very much, and the fragments of poems we get instead of dialogue, though pleasant, aren't interesting enough to hold the viewer's attention for 90 minutes. I enjoyed my time with this film but I feel that I won't remember any of it a year from now.

An ambitious though not always effective attempt at celebrating the works of famed Norwegian poet Tarjei Vesaas and the ideas espoused through his writings. The film's inventive though sometimes overly cryptic narrative and cinematography tell an intriguing though somewhat underdeveloped story of love, death, loss, friendship and carrying on set in the context of a road trip buddy movie in the wilds of the Norwegian landscape. Nice sentiments and heartfelt emotions run through the film, but sometimes they go on far too long, with much-needed editing to make them more manageable -- and meaningful. Enjoy it as much as you can, but don't be surprised if it starts to try your patience after a while.