This is a comment text. The author is responsible for the analysis and positioning in the text.
You regularly alternate between heartfelt and pleasant laughter – and limp, cold and harsh laughter. “Are these people really sane?”
It’s as entertaining as it is annoying.
Björn Carlberg and Johan Palmgren’s brilliant little documentary in the shadow of Vasaloppet, “Brytbussen”, leaves no one indifferent. The full range of madness is here, along with some magically beautiful human moments.
Here we join those who have to cancel the Vasaloppet (around 2,000 last year) for one reason or another. There are all kinds here: those who get injured, break a ski, have heart problems, scrape, collapse, those who have trained a hundred miles, those who have not skied a meter.
The fools are special Category. “It’s the first and last time I’ll go cross-country skiing,” says a disappointed and annoyed man after the rope comes off and he gets on a bus bound for Mora.
So he went to Sälen to ride the Vasaloppet and the nine miles to Mora. And it’s the first time he’s put on a pair of skis.
Is he completely crazy!?
It’s not the first or the last time you ask yourself this question as a viewer during the 33-minute film.
The first time you pull the rope is in Smågan at 10.30am. At this point you have covered just over a mile. So you had two and a half hours to get there from the start (the rope in Smågan won’t run until 11 a.m. in 2026).
The speed there doesn’t particularly impress you.
A Dutchman tells a distanced woman on the bus who is also broken: “It’s the first time I’ve ever been on snow.” “How much have you trained?” she asks herself. “Nothing,” he says.
Björn Carlberg and Johan Palmgren also handle the unintentional comedy well. And above all, it’s still a little sad, a little deadly and a little beautiful. The conversations in “Brytbussen” vary in content – many have a lot of humor and self-irony, others have no humor at all and zero self-distance.
Some may find the organizer’s tug of war pure liberation, but for most it is a personal disappointment – their sense of failure is real and touching. An exhausted woman cries and sobs for a long time as she reaches the hateful rope.
It’s not that easy Be a rope puller too – disappointed drivers are constantly trying to persuade you to say “Please, I have to move on”. Occasionally there will also be scolding.
Perhaps the most endearing people in the film are the bus drivers who return year after year to fulfill their task: driving the bitter losers to Mora. Full of love and understanding – and humanity. They are sober and have seen and heard most things.
“Brytbussen” is the perfect documentary technique to stand aside and observe this powerful, strange spectacle that the Vasaloppet has become. I would be very surprised if the films didn’t have a Golden Globe nomination when the time comes, like in a small box.
Another one posing Slightly out of the way, but in a completely different way and in a completely different genre, is Frederic Pavlidis from the Football Channel – when will he be nominated for an award, by the way?
His recurring reviews of what the biggest newspapers and the most important football columnists are writing about week after week in Europe are some of the best and most readable things you can find in Swedish football journalism.
He browses the media of all major football countries, he reads and translates texts from English, German, French, Italian and Spanish newspapers – if you want to know something valuable about top European football, you should turn to Frederic Pavlidis and his “Headlines”.
What a horse job that he can do it. Thank God for Pavlidi’s footballing efforts.
Read more texts by Johan Croneman
