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