Tag: Fishing

Arctic

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

A man (played by Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, clad in a ton of arctic protective clothing) alone in an isolated, snow-covered landscape digs purposefully with a shovel in the snow. Making little channels and throwing the content of his shovel to one side. A harsh clang clang clang sounds repeatedly as he bashes the shovel against the surface to clear its blade. What he’s up to we have no idea. Until after some time, a big overhead shot shows us the letters SOS.

You might expect a film about a pilot stranded in the Arctic to start off with a plane crash. That would be a complex and expensive scene to shoot and might well upstage any narrative that followed. Brazilian-born director Penna admirably avoids that seemingly inevitable pitfall by starting his movie with his pilot already down. We see in considerable detail the aftermath of the crash, the downed, intact hulk of an aircraft now the pilot’s makeshift home in which he shelters from the elements. We watch him rig up fishing lines to attract food from below the ice to feed himself, a set-up soon damaged by a passing polar bear later seen in the distance.

A helicopter appears over the horizon. His chance to be rescued. But then the unthinkable happens. Something goes wrong and the chopper crashes. He travels to the crash site. One of the two man crew is dead. The second crew member (Maria Thelma Smáradóttir) is alive but unconscious. Our pilot puts her on a stretcher and drags her body back to the safety of his own crashed plane. When she eventually wakes, she’s delirious. She can’t speak. She can barely move. He resolves to drag her across a frozen mountain range back to civilisation.

That subsequent journey comprises the bulk of the film. Penna knows exactly what resources he has to work with and utilising a lean and efficient script co-written with editor Ryan Morrison deploys them brilliantly. On his journey the pilot uses a map so that we always know, at least as much as he does, where we are on the journey. The environment, all shot for real in frozen tundra, is cold, inhospitable and deserted apart from the polar bear who you know is going to put in a closer appearance later on (and if you didn’t know that, there’s a shot in the trailer).

All that storytelling skill might count for nothing without either decent actors or skilful direction. Although Smáradóttir appears to not to have to do very much, the actress gives a commendably restrained and self-effacing turn as a woman who, when she’s actually conscious, is confused, traumatised and not really aware of what’s going on around her. However, the performance on which the film ultimately stands or falls is Mikkelsen’s. With scarcely a word of dialogue, you absolutely believe not only that he’s stranded in subzero conditions but also that he’s a smart cookie who will do whatever it takes to get himself – and later himself and the injured woman – to safety.

Whether or not the pilot achieves that goal we won’t tell you here because it would ruin your experience of the film, at least on your first viewing. Suffice to say, there are a number of scenes of incidents where the direction the narrative is taking suddenly switches due to circumstances outside the main protagonist’s control. These include the very last shot which sets you up for an ending you think you can see coming a mile off, then unexpectedly moves the goalposts to deliver something entirely different. I doubt you’ll see a film with a more satisfying ending this year.

In short, a film which makes exemplary use of sparse resources, stands on an amazing performance by its leading man and absolutely succeeds in telling the story it sets out to tell. Not to be missed!

Arctic is out in the UK on Friday, May 10th. On VoD on Monday, June 24th.

Bait

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

This is one of the best, most distinctive, and formally stimulating films at Berlinale, while also a fully accessible, funny movie that draws unbearable tension out of pulling pints and nodding heads. Bait takes place in the height of Summer, though you wouldn’t know it from the murky black and white cinematography. As a Cornish fishing village is swamped by tourists tensions are on the rise after a rich city family has bought up a street’s worth of property and turned them into Airbnbs.

Like a modern-day A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936), Bait observes the tension between rural and city folk and sees the darkness to which such misunderstanding can lead. Edward Rowe’s increasingly desperate fisherman takes us along with him, as he lives hand to mouth and dreams of buying a boat to improve his catch. The tourists he was forced to sell his family home to, who repeatedly refer to themselves as a part of the community, keep trying to make his life even harder, though of course its all within their legal rights.

Bait is also great Brexit movie. But that’s not to say that it’s a single issue movie. This film will still be relevant long after we’ve got our blue passports, because these are battles that have always taken place, probably always will. But the way Jenkin relates past and present, generational and class divide, allows the film to take on mythic qualities.

That is motivated in part by the extraordinary formalism of the film, which features sustained use of extreme close-ups and rapid-fire editing. Rarely does a shot last more than 6 seconds. So when it does, you feel the stretch of time and movement across the frame. It controls you with that rhythm, toys with your heartbeat. Every cut manages to extend time by sort of starting again, a Bressonian method of separating people. Restricting perspective in this case actually spreads it, we see the community in snatches, views of the village through open doors or window panes. We hear things that we don’t see. This forces us to complete the village, to fill in the gaps.

One bravura moment has two conversations occur simultaneously, with each cut to a different face as the actor says their line. It almost moves too fast to follow, this constant dislocation between faces pushes you into the harsh anxiety within the pub, as you try to catch up on one conversation while falling behind on another. It’s a radical moment of sound design, I feel like I witnessed something akin to when M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970)premiered, and audiences complained about its non-intelligibility. But this is almost the inverse of Altman’s maximalism, where the cacophony is achieved by stripping away elements from the scene.

This tableau approach to the framing of each shot means that the characters become figural, expressions of their status within the town, and the larger social class system. But within that, the actors give such spirited performances that mere gestures count for everything. When Simon Shepherd’s uber-Tory pulls a flat face at our fisherman to shut him down, his pout and sagging jowls belie an entire personality, an entire class of person who will keep on taking what they believe should be theirs.

Jenkin also uses this approach to turn his faces into the folkloric. The local pub is covered in statues of British insignia – so people look at the bust of Queen Victoria bust as though it’s a person, and Jenkin treats it as though that is the case. It’s a pub crowded with faces, British portraits in shadow, macabre and demonic, like faces in a Welles film.

Bait is real tactile cinema. The 16mm grain, the scratches and the flickers of light draw our relationship to these spaces. And those objects, which our characters have lived with all their lives and are seeing reappropriated for the sake of a holiday, become increasingly important to the film’s escalating sense of dread. When this film makes it into cinemas, it needs to be seen. Because nothing else coming out of Britain right now has the same rage or daring as this.

Bait premiered at the Berlinale in February, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 30th. Available on various VoD platforms as of January 2023.