Portland

''From now on it's you and me against the rest of the world'', says the 23-year-old Janus to his younger brother Jakob. Janus has just been released from prison after serving a stretch for drug trafficking and Jacob has just run away from a juvenile detention centre. Jakob despairs when Janus immediately returns to his criminal way of life and his addiction to pills. The first thing he does is to steal a car in which the brothers drive around in their recently acquired freedom. In order to sort out his debts to a gang leader, Janus begins to work as a messenger for him, which in part involves him forcing pensioners to sell him their medicine, which is then sold by dealers on the streets. Jakob follows on his heels. He clings desperately onto his older brother and believes that everything will be all right, as long as they stick together. But everything changes the day that Janus falls in love with Eva ... The film focuses on the Iife of the two brothers and their relationship. Jakob is weak and doubts Janus. But it is Janus who makes the decisions. A significant scene is when a man is about to commit suicide in front of them and desperately pleads: ''Aren't you even going to try to talk me out of it?''. Jakob is overwrought, while Janus ''knows better'' and ignores it all. According to the philosophy: ''you've got to be ready for everything and mustn't give a shit about anything'', he protects his younger brother as well as giving him lessons in how to get along in a ''tough world.”Portland is a dark and violent, yet captivating film, with occasional unexpected glimpses of humour: such as the marked contrast when Jakob gets lost one night and ends up at a country and western club with two cowgirls. Otherwise the film is accompanied by a heavier kind of music and is set throughout in AIborg's underworld: deserted streets, sterile tower blocks and cellar-dark, raw clubs where a girl fits into the gang if she has ''good tits, tight cunt and sucks like an animal''. Director Niels Arden Oplev uses an impressive camera technique - the outdoor scenes use a mobile camera and a coarse, orange-yellow image quality - with obvious influences from his Danish colleague Lars von Trier. JR