The Orange Girl - DVD

Film: Do you believe in great love at first sight? If your answer is "Yes", then the film adaptation of Jostein Gaarder's bestseller "The Orange Girl" is definitely the movie for you. If your answer is "No", you should still give the romantic drama a chance. Because maybe the film succeeds in its pleasantly unobtrusive way to convert you to a hopeless romantic.

Somewhere in Oslo, on a very normal day, a very normal young man gets on a tram. At that moment, however, Jan Olav (Harald Thompson Rosenstrøm) has no idea that this will have anything but normal consequences for his life. But suddenly his eyes fall on a young woman in a red coat, who is carrying a bag full of oranges. And immediately Jan Olav is smitten. He can no longer forget the orange girl (Annie Dahr Nygaard). Again and again he travels the route, perhaps to meet the beautiful stranger once again, Just when he thinks he has to give up, he comes face to face with his dream girl.

Years later, young Georg (Mikkel Bratt Silset) is still struggling with the anger and grief over the death of his father, Jan Olav, several years ago. It is not until a long farewell letter Georg reads during a trip to a snowy area in the Norwegian mountains that he might find that all-important closure. The love story Georg is told in the letter shows the boy his father in a whole new light, offering him a new perspective on his own future.

With "The Orange Girl" Eva Dahr, one of Norway's most prolific filmmakers, has directed an enchanting modern fairy tale that can evoke quite big emotions with the simplest of means. The interplay between the two plot levels harmonizes quite wonderfully, although each of the two stories also works very well on its own.

Eva Dahr has succeeded very well in filtering out the essence of Gaarder's novel and conjuring something entirely her own from it. Thus her version of the story differs in many moments clearly from the original of the "Sophies Welt" author. For example, some important characters from the novel, Georg's grandparents and his sister, do not appear, nor does the red cart in which his father hides the letter with the story of the Orange Girl in the book. In the film, Georg takes a very different approach, which includes how he comes to find his father's suicide note. Dahr's version of the story is more adult in some ways, but no less emotional because of it.

Submerged in restrained but very beautiful imagery shot on locations in Oslo, Norway's Rondane National Park, Erfurt and Seville, "The Orange Girl" in a short 80 minutes manages to transport viewers to a world where love and romance still seem like something magical, but at the same time feels so real and relatable. And that's exactly what reawakens the belief in the great love in the willing audience, in the love between two soul mates, in the love between father and son, between mother and child. The fact that this succeeds without any kitsch is to the film's credit.

"The Orange Girl" is, at first glance, a completely unspectacular, nice film, which actually only reveals in retrospect how much power lies in its story and its staging. Simple and yet beautiful and exactly therefore absolutely worth seeing for lovers of romantic arthouse cinema!

Picture + Sound: The clean image of the DVD pleases with its warm coloring and good contrasts. The sharpness of the picture also satisfies. Sound is decent, with the action primarily confined to the quiet score, dialogue, and restrained ambient noise. Good!

Extras: Just over 20 minutes of extras, consisting of interviews (approx. 7 min.), a brief behind-the-scenes look at the filming in Seville (approx. 2 min.), a music video for the song "Silk" (approx. 4 min.), a short video diary of the actors highlighting the shooting in the snowy mountains (approx. 4 min.) and the trailer. You won't get any really in-depth information about the shooting or the adaptation of the novel, but it's entertaining and worth seeing. As an additional extra there is an audio CD with the single to the film included in the DVD. A nice encore!

Conclusion: "The Orange Girl" is an enchanting romantic fairy tale that should be a must for every arthouse lover. The DVD is technically well realized, has quite little but solid bonus material. But here the film is so beautiful that it alone is reason enough to purchase this DVD. Recommended

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp