Tag: Iceland

Beautiful Beings

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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Step over, Euphoria (Sam Levinson, 2019-). When it comes up to hyper-attenuated and messed-up portrayals of youth, you have a serious contender from Iceland in the form of Beautiful Beings. Telling the story of four kids growing up in a rugged and beaten-down Reykjavik, it’s a dark, mysterious and complex portrayal of young life that is equal parts beautiful and grotesque.

It’s a 90s period piece. The main give away is the sheer amount these 14-year-olds smoke. Given that a pack of cigarettes in Iceland these days is just over £10, there’s no way that they could chain with the absolute glee seen here. Likewise, the country, known for its natural beauty, has never looked quite so depressing and ruinous. Director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson and his team do some great location work here to depict a city that feels like one of the worst places in the world to grow up.

We start with Balli (Áskell Einar Pálmason), who comes from a broken home and is a shy reticent boy. His mother is off scoring drugs and drinking with friends, while his abusive step-dad is in jail. To make matters worse, he is terrorised by the cooler kids In the first of many violent scenes to come, he is smacked in the face with a branch. This attracts the attention of Konni (Viktor Benóný Benediktsson), Siggi (Snorri Rafn Frímannsson) and Addi (Birgir Dagur Bjarkason), who think it’s fun to terrorise Balli and make fun of his injuries. Nonetheless, Addi is revealed to be a far more sensitive soul, eventually reaching out to Balli and becoming his best friend.

Unlike many movies, where bullies are often one-dimensional and uninteresting, this film does a great job of showing the ways that bullies can become friends and friends can become bullies. But while Siggi bullies to fit in and Konni to assert power, Addi seems to do it just because he can. This also makes it easier for him to stop. But in a few strange dream sequences, he starts to sense violence coming around the corner, which finally erupts with incredible force and brutality.

The kids do a great job of navigating an almost-adultless world, free to run around, smoke, experiment with drugs and rib each other over the slightest deviation from the so-called masculine norm. Their lives are captured with handheld camera-work, soft colours and nuanced editing choices, resulting in a poignant portrait of broken youth, the cycle of violence and the difficulty of finding your place in such a terrible world.

Nonetheless, viewers should beware: there are scenes of sexual violence here that are likely to turn some people off. While the more joyful parts of the kids lives go someway counteract the misery-fest, they’re not quite handled with the nuance that such a difficult topic deserves. Despite this, the kindness and the tenderness remains. While adults may have ruined their chances of being better people, kids are often far more malleable. There’s still a chance that they’ll be alright.

Beautiful Beings plays in Competition at TIFF, running from 17th-26th June.

Cop Secret

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

This Scandinavian movie answers one of the most important questions of our time: what if Tango and Cash, from Tango and Cash (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1989), were also lovers? Taking the homoerotic subtext of 80s and 90s buddy cop thrillers and putting it at the heart of the movie, this cop parody posits a new kind of hard-boiled masculinity for the 21st century. While ultimately an uneven take on the beloved genre, Cop Secret is a slick, at time hilarious production that shows off a lighter side to the usually dour and stoically-depicted Nordic nation.

Bussi (Auðunn Blöndal) is the toughest cop in Reykjavik, opening the film with blatant disregard for rules, restrictions and different jurisdictions. He’s your typical alpha-male, unwashed protagonist, a bald, leather-jacketed, jäger-swilling, punch-first-ask-questions-later kind of guy who represents an absolute nightmare for the police HR department.

The Sylvester Stallone to his Kurt Russell is the wealthy, metrosexual, impeccably-groomed, openly polyamorous and proudly pansexual Hördur (Egill Einersson). He’s already rich and speaks 15 languages fluently (it would be sixteen but he chose not to learn Danish on principle). Together they fight for supremacy of Iceland: when meeting at the heart of a robbery Bussi asks if Kenny Rogers is playing while Hördur asks if he’s at a casino. Nonetheless, they are both ultimately respectful of each other’s excellent police work and soon find their personal and professional lives tangling.

Villain Rikki (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) is purposefully Europacorp-satirising Eurotrash, talking in English with an accent that feels like a parody of a Trump parody. Haraladsson’s performance is deeply inspired, deliberately bizarre and filled with pointless anecdotes about animal behaviour. It’s the only part of the movie that feels truly cut loose, channelling that raw energy that makes something like Tango and Cash, a complete mess of a movie that’s nonetheless utterly brilliant as a result, so unique.

The American influences, ranging from Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987) to The Other Guys (Adam McKay, 2010) are pretty pronounced, and the overall tone so polished, Dwayne Johnson — recently himself riffing off this same genre with the rather uneven Hobbs and Shaw (David Leitch, 2019)— could turn up and it wouldn’t feel incongruous. Nonetheless, while American cop comedies thrive off gay panic jokes, baiting audiences with subtext before a Mark Wahlberg-type shouts he’s not “really gay” so everyone can understand he’s still a cool Boston cop, Cop Secret actually goes the extra mile, normalising the concept of a an alpha male cop who can be gay while beating the shit out of bad guys.

The ultimate scheme of the bad guys is mostly irrelevant — something to do with hacking, a football game and a gold reserve — and makes little to no ultimate sense. Thankfully, this satire manages to nail the basics of good, clean action choreography, realising that it has to look like the real deal in order to work at all. While the relatively smaller Icelandic budget sometimes shows in rushed CGI backgrounds and the odd awkward edit, director Hannes Þór Halldórsson (who usually spends his time in goal for the Icelandic national team!) has studied the basics of the genre well, resulting in a fun and easy film to kick back to with a couple of drinks in hand.

Cop Secret played in Concorso internazionale at Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival.

Discover Iceland in all its glory!

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The Icelandic movie Echo (Bergmál), which premiered in competition at the 72nd Locarno Film Festival, is a major step up in form and content for Icelandic director Rúnar Rúnarsson. Set over the Christmas period, its a wide-spanning portrayal of the nation that’s equal parts profound, funny, and banal. Its standout quality is the way it marries formalist rigour — each scene focusing on a new character and shot with a single static camera — with emotion, humour and philosophical enquiry. We sat down with the director to discuss his unique approach to hybrid forms, Icelandic society, and working with real people.

Read our review now!

Redmond Bacon – Echo is very different from single character portraits Volcano (2011) and Sparrows (2015). Why the massive change in tone?

Rúnar Rúnarsson – I wouldn’t say that its a massive change in tone. People say to me: “you made some radical changes in your life making this film”. The fundamental difference is that we are portraying society instead of one person, but I think the fingertips of the creative team and I are quite similar.

RB – Echo takes such a panoramic view of Iceland. Do you think it will strike a chord across Icelandic society?

RR – Festival-wise my films have always done well, but I’ve never sold tickets anywhere, not even at home. I’ve been privileged in my life to do the things that I wanted. But you can’t have it all. You can’t have sold out theatres night after night. My main aim has always been to follow my vision. I have no expectations towards ticket sales, in Iceland or elsewhere. To be completely honest, I don’t think in this way. I have a big misconception of my films though. I think they are really audience friendly but I’m still regarded as an “artist director”!

RB – I think Echo is very accessible due to how true to life it is, and its humour. The form of the film is a hybrid between documentary footage and fiction. How much was documentary footage and how much was fiction?

RR – There was a really detailed manuscript. I think there were maybe nine or ten scenes that didn’t end up in the film. The rules we had were made for effect. I think we achieved a sense of authenticity. We decided not to say what is real and what is in full control. Anyway, even when you look at a fly-on-the-wall documentary, there are decisions such as when you come in and out of a shot and how its put together. There is always a sense of the author.

RB – Yes, there’s always an artificiality to a documentary, because you choose what to put in, you choose what to take out and you choose how to present it and edit it together. It doesn’t just happen by itself.

RR – All my fictional films are about things I’ve gone through in my life or people close to me. My goal is to be honest and capture a sense of reality and a sense of my emotions; to put it out for whoever would be interested. Most scenes in this film are in a greyscale. All people in front of the camera are under their own identity; sometimes you hear their names. And it is their real names. Often they are in their native surroundings.

Echo

RB – These are native actors playing versions of themselves?

RR – Sometimes being themselves, sometimes following a script. There are some with acting backgrounds, then they went into farming and play a farmer in the film.

RB – There’s so many different perspectives in the film…

RR – Iceland is a small community. The Prime Minister of Iceland [Katrín Jakobsdóttir] is in this film. We bumped into her while shooting another scene. There are homeless people as well. I know the assistant to the Prime Minister and I know one of the homeless people really well. In a society so small, you know somebody in every situation.

RB – So there isn’t a massive divide between rich in poor in terms of being aware of each other?

RR – No. It’s so small. But the gap is getting bigger. There is private education and healthcare, which didn’t exist when I was growing up. Society is changing, but it still has this Scandinavian Social Democratic foundation.

RB – You tackle the Panama Papers scandal when former Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson had to resign. Was it important to have these contemporaneous elements too?

RR – We shot during Christmas 2018. There were things debated at the time that ended up in the film. But it’s not about the truth of the period; it’s an echo, hence the title, portraying fragments of life from Iceland during that time.

RB – I want to talk about another Scandinavian director. Roy Andersson. Echo has a similar mise en scène to The Living Trilogy (2000-14)? Was this an inspiration?

RR – A friend of mine didn’t understand the project I was working on. I was about to go to the financing place and gave him the script. He went through it and said: “It’s going to be really simple for you to present this film. Just tell people to imagine if Vittorio Di Sica would make a Roy Andersson film.”

RB – In terms of narration it reminded me of the British movie Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003), in that there’s a lot of stories set around Christmas and the season itself becomes the narrator. Was this an inspiration at all?

RR – No. But when I was developing the movie it was at first about these fragments of life. First I thought about doing it over the period of a year. But I wouldn’t ever be able to afford it, and the more I developed it, the more I wanted to have more control. I felt like Christmas was the right framework because it’s hard to sympathise with people you don’t know. In normal films you have the time to build up a character and for the audience to care about them. Here you meet people and then they’re gone and never reappear…

RB – But Christmas gives it this sentimental overlay?

RR – Yes. It’s an amplifier of our emotions. It helps the audience to be put in the place of these people. Many of them have been in these situations. It’s a time of year where people are more observant. They try to be better people; more generous and open-minded. At the same time, for many people, it’s the worst time of the year. It was a good guide to constructing a narrative.

RB – Was it all shot within this two week period?

RR – There was one scene we just had to do earlier. The burning house scene is from another time of the year.

RB – That’s a very evocative scene. It reminded me of The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986).

RR – He had to burn that house two times.

Your

RB – Films are always set against nature, a natural byproduct, I guess, of shooting in Iceland. But this film seems mostly focused on the people itself, which goes against a conventional approach to depicting the country. Was this intentional?

RR – It was never my intention of decorating something in nature. Nature is a part of living in Iceland. Look out the window and there are mountains! Nature is beautiful. But it shouldn’t only be used for decoration or production value. You should use it as a narrative tool. In a perfect film, everything that you see or hear should have a function. For example, the final shot of the film is there not only because its beautiful. It’s a metaphor of life continuing. Water is a transition, a vessel in the water, going through the tides and waves. It’s the year ahead.

RB – There are some great transitions, such as between a Children’s Christmas Pageant and a Bikini Body Building Contest. How long did it take to think “OK, this will go here and this will go there” before putting these scenes together to develop the film’s rhythm?

RR – We slowly put the film together while we were shooting. Working with these tableaus. Whether you go 10 seconds earlier in or out of a scene can have such an impact on the rhythm. So we try to take enlightened decisions. But you shouldn’t be too clever. You have to follow your instincts.

RB – The film has a strong cycle of life theme, best expressed when it contrasts New Years Eve celebrations with a baby being born. How did you gain the trust of the couple to film a live birth?

RR – Like with many other people in the film, it was a search for the right people who were generous enough to share their lives. There were many other people who showed interest then backed out. We have no control over a birth. We are not cutting either. We thought we would have to shoot many different births to have something to choose between. But we were just extremely lucky and only shot one birth.

To get people to participate in this kind of thing is about being honest with what we want to achieve. I don’t want to to manipulate anybody; whether its real people or my fictional characters. They represent something in me and I want to respect myself. Sometimes I’ve been to film school conducting lectures. At the end the moderators ask: “Do you have a message to the students? What should they do?”

And I say “Be honest!”

Photo Credit: Ottavia Bosello. Also pictured: Producers Live Hide (left) and Lilja Ósk Snorradóttir (right). Others photos are from the film itself.

Echo (Bergmál)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

This film is basically Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003) directed by Roy Andersson. Comprised of only 56 static takes, Rúnar Rúnarsson calmly takes Iceland’s pulse during the Christmas season; delivering a panorama that is equal parts funny, sad, ironic and loving. Displaying a supreme confidence in direction and writing, this is a major step up in form and content.

I’m surprised Rúnarsson had something so sentimental within him. His last two films, Volcano (2011) and Sparrows (2015), are far harsher visions of life. In contrast, Echo takes in nearly every human emotion, all wrapped up in an inescapably sentimental Christmassy bow.

It spans through the Advent season to the New Year, that time of year when families are reunited, stress levels are high, and wallets are strained. Everyone is in the mood to either try and enjoy themselves, or simply get through the darkest days in the year. Spanning from rich to poor, old to young, alone or surrounded with family, it feels like all of Icelandic life is contained within this film.

The static frames work wonders, Rúnarsson cleverly using these aesthetic limits to his advantage. Like in Andersson’s “The Living Trilogy” (2000-2014) the wide lens allows for multiple stories to play out in the same frame and for stories to change in perspective depending on whether characters are in the foreground or the background. It would’ve been easy to simply have filmed these stories in a conventional way, but this ambitious arthouse approach elevates it into the sublime.

Some scenes work as self-contained short stories. From the girl visiting her father hilariously upstaged by her step-sister to the stressed dad wondering what Christmas tree to buy to the poor woman visiting her grandfather with dementia, we get a sense of entire personalities, conflicts and histories through the fleetest of glimpses. There are elements of the documentary too, real people captured in the midst of old traditions (singing Silent Night in Icelandic) and the modern world (a huge gym full of TV screens and people on treadmills).

Echo

Nonetheless, this is no mere depiction of standard Western practices and customs, but a specifically Icelandic piece that also tackles the most problematic parts of its society. The Panama Papers scandal is invoked, as is the wealth gap, food banks and drug addiction. The question of immigration is also a hot topic here: from an African-American expat using a sun-bed to ward off darkness-induced depression to border police raiding a sanctuary church, we see that Iceland is a nation in the process of significant demographic change. While not containing anything as shocking as the ending of Sparrows, Rúnarsson deftly shows how Iceland’s relative success still doesn’t work for everyone.

Juxtaposition is constantly used, sometimes for humour (when a Christmas pageant is contrasted with a bikini body-building contest), sometimes for profundity (the birth of a child occurring directly after the New Year celebrations are rung in) and sometimes for political effect (contrasting people queuing up at a food bank with a lavish family meal). The editing by Jacob Secher Schulsinger is crisp and precise, everything compressed into a transient 79 minutes. Watching it is akin to reading an epic poem, with each image boiled down to its purest essence.

What’s interesting to note is that there are few images of Iceland’s natural beauty. Instead the people themselves are the main focus of this tale. When you consider that the population of the country (338,000 people) is just above that of Coventry, it can be safely asserted that at least 1% of the entire nation is represented here. One of the Christmas traditions in Iceland, at least according to this movie, is to give each other a big hug when the Church bells chime in the big day. This is an apt metaphor for the movie itself, which acts as a warm, loving embrace from one of the world’s coldest places.

Echo showed at the 2019 Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s on Mubi in August 2020.

Echo is in our list of Top 10 dirtiest films of 2019.

Metalhead (Málmhaus)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Tragedy befalls a rural Icelandic farming family when son Baldur (Óskar Logi Ágústsson), summoned for dinner by younger sister Hera (Diljá Valsdóttir), falls off the tractor into the threshing device he’s towing. A chunk of flesh comes off and there’s a surprisingly small amount of blood. The sequence is not perfect: had it been far more explicit with more blood, gore and medical detail, that would have fitted with the film’s subsequent investment in the excesses of heavy metal music.

The family predictably goes into shock and at the church funeral Hera glowers at a painting of Jesus. She deals with her loss by (1) adopting her brother’s metal band T-shirts, leather jackets and trousers (which, unbelievably, fit her perfectly) and burning all her own, very ordinary, young girl’s clothes, (2) listening to his heavy metal record collection and (3) playing metal riffs on his guitar and amp. She tries to leave the area for Reykjavik, but at the stop can’t bring herself to board the bus. After a few years, Hera is still living in the area as a metal-obsessed and -garbed teenager (Thora Bjorg Helga) and the guitar has inexplicably turned into a Flying V.

Neither of Hera’s parents have coped well. Her mum Droplaug (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) retains the dead boy’s room as if he were still alive while her dad Karl (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) blames himself for not putting a cover on the driveshaft. They’re pretending everything’s fine when it really isn’t and their relationship has grown cold. They’re also failing to meet the spiritual/emotional needs of their teenage daughter – not the easiest of tasks at the best of times and one made much worse by all three surviving family members’ repression of their tragedy.

Subplots involve Hera’s childhood friend Knútur (Hannes Óli Ágústsson) whose platonic relationship soon turns more physically sexual and newly arrived parish priest Janus (Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson) who bonds psychically with the girl when she learns he not only likes all the bands she does but also has a metal tattoo on his shoulder. The latter wisely rejects her attempts to throw herself at him.

The film has a few glimmering moments. An early meal time scene has mother glower at daughter while some tomato sauce hangs off the edge of Hera’s plate like blood in a still from an unmade horror film festering in the back of the writer-director’s mind. And the hand of a small kid in a metal T-shirt makes a respectful Sign of the Horns to Hera in a local shop.

There is much to admire in the portrait of a small village where community and Christian religion are woven together to everyone’s benefit, although viewers may wince at the way when Hera moves in with Knútur she suddenly abandons the leather jackets in favour of the more conservative woolly jumpers and outdoor weather jackets that everyone else wears. As if to say, in this community you need to conform, it’s unacceptable to be that little bit different.

Metalhead is available to stream on all major VoD platforms, and is part of the Walk This Way collection.