absent father

Paris of the North (2015)

André Crous

Subtle comedy set in far reaches of Iceland’s cold Westfjords has a warm heart with likeable (but not entirely lovable) characters.

Paris of the NorthIceland
4*

Director:
Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson
Screenwriter:
Huldar Breiðfjörð
Director of Photography:
Magni Ágústsson

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: París Norðursins

“The one who travels the farthest knows the least”, the middle-aged Svanur tells the 37-year-old school teacher, Hugi (Björn Thors), who is a recovering alcoholic. The men live in a tiny, secluded village on the coast of north-western Iceland. Hugi copes with his addiction by attending weekly AA meetings with his sponsor, Svanur, and Svanur’s son, a deadbeat dad named Richard who plays in a band and spends most of the day smoking a bong. These meetings with three people who introduce themselves to each other again and again have an absurdist quality that sets the tone for much of the film. Also, that quotation is from Lao-Tzu and seems comically out of place in the vast, desolate landscape of the Westfjords peninsula.

All of this is about to be upended, however, when Hugi’s nomadic father, Veigar (Helgi Björnsson), phones him up out of the blue, and he is too reluctant to say no to him coming over from Reykjavik. But the very first glimpse we get of the father does not bode well. When he disembarks at the airport, he stands on the runway and lights up a cigarette. Also, he is carrying a large cage with a dog inside.

With Paris of the North, Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson, the director of the minimalist but hugely entertaining Either Way (Á annan veg) — remade as the equally engaging English-language Prince Avalanche, by David Gordon Green — has created another very compelling film whose characters are likeable but not entirely lovable. And it is this delicate balance, along with beautiful sequences of tracking shots showing Hugi running to the surprisingly haunting sounds of Richard’s band, that makes the film such a consistent pleasure.

Guarding over all of their quirky ways is Thorfinnur (Þorfinnur), a mountain that seems to rise up out of nothingness. But while the mountain never moves, many of the characters are uneasy with the place they have reached in life. Hugi is yearning for an ex-girlfriend, Helena, who has moved to Portugal. He is even learning Portuguese, but his phone conversations with Helena provide no reason for optimism. His father, Veigar, has spent some time in Thailand, buying and selling a bar and fathering a child in the process. Richard’s ex-wife, who used to date Hugi, is now flirting with Veigar. Everybody is unmoored, seemingly lost and adrift.

While Hugi, at least for a while, finds some company by kicking around a football with one of his students, the 10-year-old Albert (Haki Lorenzen), who not coincidentally is also Richard’s son, this clearly cannot be what his life will be like, and he recognises this all too well.

What he needs is an intervention of sorts, and not the one that AA sponsor Svanur wants to stage when he fears Hugi may have fallen off the wagon. He needs to make a life-changing decision, based not on his obsession with his former girlfriend but on something else – perhaps himself. It is a difficult journey, especially because everybody sees (and tells each other) how good he would be as a father, but being responsible in one aspect of one’s life does not mean everything is sorted out.

Paris of the North conveys both the beauty of the majestic Thorfinnur and the grubby streets of the former fishing village that lies next to it, and it shows characters straddling the line between the safety of mediocrity and the desperation of repetition. Love or lust often pose a challenge for the characters to make the right decision, but in the end, they do find an answer that works, one that may initially be sad but is emotionally satisfying and feels just right. Director Sigurðsson has a fine career ahead of him.

Sparrows (2015)

André Crous

Rúnar Rúnarsson’s second feature film provides an emotionally resonant look at a teenage boy’s coming of age on Iceland’s majestic Westfjords peninsula.

sparrowsIceland
4*

Director:
Rúnar Rúnarsson
Screenwriter:
Rúnar Rúnarsson
Director of Photography:
Sophia Olsson

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: Þrestir

The first time we see the teenage Ari’s face, he is singing in a 28-boy-strong choir in Reykjavik. The hall in which they are performing is stately and white as snow, and as the rays of sunlight hit his neck, we see what appear to be light tufts of down. This boy is still very much an innocent angel, and although he will mostly remain that way for the duration of the film, the situations he is confronted with become ever more complex as he gradually learns what it is to be a man.

Sparrows (Þrestir), Rúnar Rúnarsson’s second feature film, doesn’t cover the usual bases of a coming-of-age story. Yes, in this case, there is a divorce, an absent father, his first sexual encounter and so forth, but Rúnarsson’s perceptive eye for teenage politics in general and the loneliness of an outsider in particular, as well as frequent dips into melancholia that wash over the pale, almost inexpressive face of the main character, make this a wonderful glimpse of one boy’s life in the wilderness.

Said wilderness is Iceland’s Westfjords, the country’s large peninsula to the northwest, where cliffs rise up sharply out of the ocean and appear to be much more imposing than their actual height would lead one to believe. The town where almost all of the action is set is the hamlet of Flateyri, although shots of nearby Bolungarvík also make up the fictional town here. Everyone here knows each other, but this familiarity is worlds removed from Ari’s former life in the capital with his mother, who has now upped and moved to Africa with her Danish husband.

In spite of the talk of hunting, the fighting and the sex, it ultimately becomes clear to Ari that being a man does not mean being macho. Being a man does not even mean one has to be responsible. However, it does entail dealing honestly with one’s own shortcomings, and that is why the film’s final image – an intimate hug between two men – is ultimately so incredibly powerful. On three occasions, the ethereal sounds of a piece of music by Kjartan Sveinsson lift Sparrows into the realm of the transcendental, flawlessly complementing the religious songs that Ari sings on multiple occasions, including, most strikingly, all alone inside a giant water tower. His solos bring almost heartbreaking calm to the turmoil that we know he is experiencing on the inside.

The film has countless small moments that are not highlighted but stand firm as milestones that line Ari’s journey towards maturity. While there will be a great deal of focus on a particularly traumatic scene late in the plot that will have the viewer’s stomach churning with empathy, other smaller incidents are equally important. Ari’s father, Gunnar, who has drowned his sorrows in alcohol since divorcing Ari’s mother, is ill-equipped to take care of his teenage son on the cusp of adulthood but out of sorts in this new landscape. Every moment that Ari considers unique is somehow spoiled by his father who has a similar moment with other characters, from having sex with the same woman to sharing a jacuzzi and even the house with too many other people.

Throughout the film, the towering cliffs – their feet often shrouded in mist – are ever-present, seemingly about to overwhelm the insignificant figures in the foreground. In fact, our very first impression of the area is a shot of the tiny airplane flying almost too close along the fjord walls before landing at the airport in Ísafjörður. This image is followed almost immediately by a shot of Ari waiting for his father, as he has done for much of his life, at the arrivals gate.

While main actor Atli Óskar Fjalarsson is very good, the only letdown is the scenes when he is supposed to express violent rage, which unfortunately comes across as somewhat contrived. This issue is perhaps understandable given that these moments turn very sharply away from the general trajectory of the plot and the overall restrained behaviour of the character. The quieter scenes, of which there are many, are much more convincing and more effective at drawing the viewer in close to Ari.

Sparrows are never seen nor spoken of, but the title most probably refers to the small birds because of their biblical meaning of being among the smallest and least valuable of animals while nonetheless still cared for and watched over by God. While this explanation is informative, it is unclear why the title takes the plural form.

The Kid with a Bike (2011)

André Crous

Le gamin au véloBelgium
4.5*

Directors:
Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Luc Dardenne
Screenwriters:
Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Luc Dardenne
Director of Photography:
Alain Marcoen

Running time: 87 minutes

Original title: Le Gamin au vélo

The young Cyril has a very scientific mind, but this creates plenty of problems when he is faced with real-world problems that involve emotions. He doesn’t trust whatever anyone else says, unless he has seen it with his own eyes. At least, that is the case with the bicycle he assumed his father would never sell. But now, not only the bicycle but his father, too, have disappeared, and it takes a while for him to accept that they are both gone and that it was his father’s own decision to break the promise. It is interesting to note an early scene, however, in which Cyril is asked whether his father told him he was leaving. Cyril, without missing a beat, says he did, but that he can’t remember exactly what he was told.

Cyril is a character of flesh and blood, even though some early scenes may make the viewer shake her head in dismay at his foolhardy refusal to accept what he is told by others. His reaction is often to lash out, or, as in the scene where he lies about his own knowledge of his father’s actions, it seems he finds it easier to lie to himself. His own actions are not easily predictable, and this is exactly what makes him interesting.

In an early scene, he goes to the building where his father used to live but when no one answers the door and he refuses to leave the premises and the guardians from his boarding school come looking for him, he races through the building and ends up at the medical centre, where he latches onto a woman he doesn’t know for dear life. She is a hairdresser named Samantha, and she decides to look after him over weekends since he doesn’t have anyone else.

Why she does this is a mystery, a question Cyril asks her directly but which she answers with “I don’t know.” That would be fine, except that it comes almost immediately after another, slightly creepy scene in which the area’s greasy teenage drug dealer, Wes, invites Cyril to his room to drink and play video games. We don’t know what Wes’s intentions are, not what Samantha’s are beyond what we can assume is her desire to look after someone besides herself. And we can assume that Wes doesn’t want to engage with Cyril except to use him in one of his criminal schemes, but why does he leer at him while Cyril’s not looking?

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who directed The Kid with a Bike, seem to be implying that Wes and Samantha are actually quite similar at first, and may act with the same intention (in this case, perhaps, selfishness), but as both stories develop, we see their trajectories and end games clearly diverge, and maybe that is where the complexity is to be found. 

Cyril’s father, Guy, is cast perfectly and played by Jérémie Renier, who looks more like a young adult than a full-grown adult. He is not a bad guy who has forsaken his son out of ill will; on the contrary, he is scared and we learn it was actually his own mother who had taken care of Cyril. When she died, he didn’t have enough faith in himself and continues to shirk his parental responsibility. He is a nice person and certainly has more in his head than the character Renier played in the Dardennes’ The Child (L’Enfant), but he is still immature, and the moment when he asks Samantha to tell Cyril he won’t see him any more instead of doing it himself is one of the dramatic highlights of the film.

What makes this all the more poignant is that nearly the entire scene leading up to that moment, the three or four minutes that Guy spends with Cyril in the kitchen and during which he is very accommodating and never rude or disrespectful, are shot almost entirely in a single take, heightening the tension and the intimacy of the exchange. 

There are points in the film when we almost want to throw up our hands in despair and exasperation at the hysterical tantrums of the boy who is going through a rough patch in his childhood and has to learn how to cope with his new life. Late in the film, we find ourselves sympathising with him in a scene that recalls Alex DeLarge’s confrontation with the two policemen (and his former gang members) in A Clockwork Orange, when he wants to fight back but finds himself unable to do that because he has changed.

This perspective brings a disturbing twist to our interpretation of the film (Beethoven, DeLarge’s favourite composer, has a piece on the soundtrack of The Kid with a Bike that is repeated at regular intervals, his Piano Concerto, No. 5, Adagio un poco mosso), but while Kubrick and the Dardenne brothers are completely different kinds of filmmakers, neither of them are content with easy answers.

In the end, we cannot know to what extent Cyril has really grown up. He is still quite young, Wes may be looking for him, and he puts enormous pressure on any relationship Samantha may have with other men. Despite these hanging questions, the ending is strong and satisfying but certainly not sentimental. This is a Dardenne brothers film, after all.