ICE, Baltasar Kormákur, Director
Starring: Johan Sigurdarson, Olafur Darri Olafsson, Hilmikr Snaer Gudnasson, Margaret Vilhjalmsdóttir, Laufy Eliasdóttir
At risk of sounding overenthusiastic, Baltasar Kormákur’s White Night Wedding absolutely floored me. Following on the footsteps of The Sea, White Night Wedding
places Icelandic cinema firmly within the greater Scandinavian cultural
tradition. While you can easily sit back and enjoy this movie merely
for its beautiful portrayal of an ever-inspiring landscape, and its
singular Icelandic humor, Kormákur would seem to accomplish ever so much
more – in fact, despite the film’s pedigreed relationship to Anton
Chekov’s play, Ivanov, I felt that the film could also be alternately
titled “Adventures of Tesman, Hedda Gabbler’s Forgotten Mate” after one
of Henrik Ibsen’s most memorably forgettable characters.
Reminiscent of Ingrid Bergman, Kormákur seems to take Soren Kierkegaard, the Nordic Philosopher, straight-on. In fact, Kormákur does Bergman one better by allowing Kierkegaard to take his silly and illogical leap of faith, and to benefit by it. Where Bergman often mired himself in Scandinavian tragic morosity, both Lasse Hallström, a fellow Scandinavian, and Kormákur have allowed their characters to relax, literally take the leap of faith, and hit a stable grounding wherein happiness or contentment can be found without a steep loss of personal direction or universal grounding. Perhaps all is summed up best in a near-closing quote by Jon as professor, “The purpose of life isn’t death, even if that is the end result. Just as love or happiness isn’t the purpose of life, as such…rather the quest. The quest for love, the quest for happiness”.
Kormákur’s imagery is purely in line with the work of Bergman and Hallström (visual parallels with Bergman’s black and whites or Hallström’s The Shipping News cannot be missed). The humor is singularly Scandinavian (only cultures that embrace their nutter selves and are comfortable enough in their identity to laugh at their weaknesses and shortcomings, can make sense of Scandinavian humor). Jon continues, “If you are completely happy for more than ten minutes… you must be an idiot.” In line with Scandinavian common wisdom, whether that means we are all often unhappy non-idiots, or peacefully accepting buffoons, is not addressed, let alone resolved.
University Professor, Jon Jonsson (Hilmikr Snaer Gudnasson) must come to grips with his failings in his previous marriage to Anna (Margaret Vilhjalmsdóttir), his late and emotionally challenged wife, and to bury both guilt and memory so that he can marry Thora (Laufy Eliasdóttir), an attractive former student who has herself to overcome the turbulent emotional inner- and inter-psyche of her own family. Add a good-hearted loser best-friend with enormous feet, a black-baned, pre-maturely bald priest, an ill-conceived plan for a demi-golf course, and Jon’s emotionally and intellectually detached suburban (previously read “out-of-touch-bourgeois”) family, and you have the setting for a frustratingly poignant experience that will leave your belly chuckling with pleasure, your mind reasonably satisfied and your heart warm with contentment. After all, that is really what one really expects from Scandinavian cinema.
As for content, Anna convincingly embodies the post-modern dilemma of the emotionally unstable, creatively-gifted artistic spirit with its often struggle to achieve “normal” sanity and the high cost of accepting or declining post-modern pharmaceutical treatments. Kormákur contrasts Anna’s experience with the portrayal of the inner turmoil affecting the supposedly “sane” characters – Jon and his struggle to deal with his wife’s memory, the existentially tragic life of the priest, a slightly obsessive compulsive tobac operator and the completely non-logical exploits of many townsfolk. In the end, Kormákur resolves that thinnest of veils between sanity and insanity by embracing the non-sanity of the greater world and accepting the necessity of living within the parameters of a world that cannot be controlled, medicated, or treated despite our best efforts or personal needs for stability. Nor is it to be missed that Kormákur chooses to contrast the non-sanity of both Anna’s inner psyche and the world of Flatey with the logically controlled world of Jon’s university classroom. Kormákur takes steady, if subtle, potshots at the Western pillars of organized religion, the temple of the university, and the smooth operations of the capitalist economy, but in whittling the church and economy down to size, he indicates that life is perhaps stabilized through the combined effect of communal relationships, traditions grounded in landscape, music and religion, and in the support of kith and kin. In a sense, our abilities to relate to each other and to laugh at ourselves, allow us to love and love is what allows us to survive. Kormákur returns to Kierkegaard at the end of the story’s action by stabilizing the wedding party and its future on a bank of rocks that cannot be seen but whose reality, once accepted, provides both a secure footing for the moment, and a base from which future events can unfold.
Contrasted to these unseen, taken-by-faith footholds, Kormákur presents us with many visual clues that it might be rather in the rational university that we find ourselves to be foreigners, ill-adapted to thrive and struggling to cope, slipping and tripping – either internally within our psyches or externally as the hallowed halls continually vibrate and shake under the constant bombardment of external realities – of incessantly ringing cell phones, disillusioned students, ill-equipped professors literally tripping over their books and notes, and the very real need for the students and staff to eventually leave this protected environment for the unavoidable pressures, joys, and challenges of the outside world. The ability to portray all of this in a comedy while tying it all together in a unified sense makes this film truly great and essential viewing. Enjoy, but don’t think this hard about it. Kormákur brings you into it naturally. Such is his gift.
origianlly published: Prairie Swede, 01 August 2010
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