Noi is an odd comedy, paced so slowly and against such a bleak, muffled landscape that its funny moments seem almost riotous in comparison to the emptiness that swallows them before one even has a chance to laugh. Its titular hero is a seventeen year old boy who is an albino, which is in itself a rather ironic joke; in a land where the ice and the white sky meet at an entirely undeterminable point, Noi (Tomas Lemarquis) just blends in to everything else.

This, possibly, is his reason for acting out the way he does. In an early scene, he arrives late at his high school; his exasperated teacher hands him a math quiz, which he promptly turns in after filling out his name. His teacher him what sort of grade he expects for such work. "A zero," he assumes. "You get 0.5 for filling out your name," the teacher tells him. "That's better than I expected," Noi laughs before walking out of the class.

He spends most of his time wandering the barren landscape of his town (population 957), shooting at glaciers with a shotgun and chatting with the local bookseller. He has an alcoholic father whose good intentions only go so far: after a night of supposed bonding, he's so drunk he has to ask Noi to take his shift as a taxi driver. At one point pulls some strings to get him his own job, as a gravedigger. Noi spends about a few minutes chipping at the frozen earth with a pickaxe, and then gives up.

As troubled, aimless youths often are, at least in the movies, Noi is brilliant; there's a scene where he disarms a school psychiatrist by simultaneously scoffing him and solving the Rubicks Cube on his desk with only a few turns; he wins the bookseller's pornography stash by beating him at a logic game. He's a kind person, and everyone likes him (except for his exasperated teacher, who threatens to quit if Noi is not expelled); of particular importance to him is the favor he finds in Iris (Elin Hansdottir), the daughter of the bookseller, who is visiting from Reykjavik. She's elegant and beautiful, and, like him, seems set apart from the rest of the townsfolk. She inspires him to aspire to greater things, such as moving away from Iceland.

Tomas Lemarquis is in practically every scene of the film, and is charged with bringing an impenetrable character to a relatable level. He's an electric presence, with piercing eyes and an equally sharp smile providing focal points on his hairless white head; he could have easily been played as a creep, but both the performance and the script its based on are too delicate for that; we can see why his teacher hates him so and why others adore him. For instance, on his birthday, his grandmother gives him secondhand Viewfinder toy, and the hug he gives her is as tender and sincere as they come.

The film, the first from writer-director Dagur Kari, is frequently funny, but it will disappoint those looking for oddball comedy (save for one scene, involving a meat grinder, that is about as gallow as gallows humor comes). It's humor is of a colloquial sort that is not built towards or amplified in any way; it happens episodically, matter-of-factly. I was reminded of a Taiwanese film from a few years back called What Time Is It There?, in which the director paid homage to Harold Lloyd and other pioneers of comedy, but placed the jokes in a story of such sadness and pensive emptiness that one almost forgot to laugh when something funny occured.

This film also shares with this one a final touch of surreality, so subtle that it may not register until the credits are rolling and its had time to sink in. In this case, it is an apparent act of God that is, to Noi, either a means to an end or an end unto itself. It is, technically, purely natural, and in a different setting, in a country where people are not outnumbered by sheep and day and night occur in relatively equal increments, one might not assign it any grave import. In this tiny town in Iceland, though, every little thing seems to stand out -- except, try as he might, Noe himself.