HLYNUR PÁLMASON: GODLAND (2022)
GODLAND: A WORLD OF LIVED-IN HARSHNESS Doomed quest The Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason's first two films,
Winter Brothers (2017) and
A White, White Day (2019), stick in the mind. They are strange and arresting - and show growth: the second is more powerful and accomplished than the first. In
Godland, Pálmason continues his strengths and preoccupations: machismo and brutal conflicts between men, a focus on being Danish and being Icelandic. And he continues to grow: this third effort is more powerful, more ambitious, and more impressive. Still very far from being for everyone, this embodies an epic conflict, an epic failure. It's a gorgeous and striking film cinephiles must see - all two hours and twenty minutes, which are available now on the highly selective Criterion Channel streaming program.
The greater intensity and beauty of this third film grow out of its being an immersive portrait of the damp, glowing wilds of the Icelandic landscape. A period setting in the latter half of the nineteenth century raises the macho conflict to the level of nations, for this is a time when Iceland is under Danish rule, and a young Lutheran Danish priest, Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove, of
Winter Brothers) is sent by his bishop to build a church in a remote part of southeast Iceland - a hubristic gesture of domination that is doomed. (This conflict may be experienced in Pálmason himself, who lived long in Denmark, then returned to make films in Iceland.)
Lucas sets out with a translator (Hilmar Guðjónsson), who is later drowned. His own efforts to learn Icelandic notably founder on the boat when he's confronted with a bewildering number of words for rain, whose necessity soon becomes clear. He has come to a harsh and unyielding land. His guide is a big, macho older Icelandic man called Ragnar (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson of
A White, White Day), who doesn't speak any Danish, or at least doesn't seem to. The two men cordially despise each other from the very first. Theirs isn't mere "misunderstanding" in some figurative sense: Lucas and Ragnar literally cannot understand what each other are saying to, or at, each other. Linguistic incomprehension has never been more vividly felt.
But Lucas doesn't "understand" in a broader sense either. He doesn't "get" this land. He isn't "ready" for it. He's effete and detached and has an air of superiority, which is wholly unjustified because he isn't qualified to cope with situations faced. It is his insistence on crossing a river that's too wide and turbulent to be crossed that leads to the downing of the translator, securing non-communication.
Obviously there are Herzogian elements here, a man braving impossible natural challenges. The priest, in his long gown, is burdened with his own curiously artistic self-assigned mission. He carries the bulky paraphernalia of the collodion wet plate photographic process, a big wooden still camera, tripods and glass plates and heavy drop cloths under which to do the developing. It's announced at the outset that seven glass plate photos were found in the nineteenth century that were the first images of the island and this is the mythical starting point of the film. Lucas is doing his laborious wet plate photographs to "chronicle" the people he meets whom he doesn't connect with or understand. At times this seems an artificial conceit. But it is part of what makes this striking film memorable nonetheless.
The young priest is a brilliant creation; Ragnar, with his dozen horses, his morning exercises and his intractable glare, is another. Lucas turns out in the ultimate challenges of man-to-man conflict to have unexpected powers: but they won't save him. Along the way he suffers torments and humiliations, seemingly for nothing. He might have gone by boat to his destination. He insists he wants to experience travel across the land to "get to know" the country, part of which is nearly drowning, sliding off his saddle as he rides or slipping into thick mud in his priestly robes outside the new wood church full of waiting parishioners - one of the most memorable images of any movie this year. His faith is warped or transformed, for in the wilds he declares privately that he is God, and God can go away. This isn't a triumph of faith but a loss of it.
Godland (whose actual title inspired by a poem by Matthías Jochumsson, given in both Icelandic and Danish is more like "Wretched Land") is in two halves. The first half is the dramatic struggle across the land. In the second half, Lucas has arrived where he's headed and is taken in by host Carl (Jacob Hauberg Lohmann), who lives with his children, Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne), whom Lucas will want to marry, and the vibrant young blonde Ida, played by the director’s own daughter, Ida Mekkín Hlynsdottír. Lucas photographs the playful Ida stretched along the back of her shaggy pony, or at least tries to. Carl's apparent welcome turns out to be more treacherous for the lean, edgy priest than the hostility of the openly contemptuous Ragnar.
Hlynur Pálmason is a virtuoso of hostility, but he also knows wonderfully well how to make a whole landscape come to life - not only the hostile and beautiful one of Iceland (where he and his editor Julius Krebs Damsboand and cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff, framing the image in square academy ration with curved edges like antique photos, take us through stunning time-lapse sequences showing terrifying changes of local seasons) - but also the dogs and hens of Carl's farmyard, a world of busy, comfortable, and lived-in harshness. This is a richly layered film. It may sometimes seem a palimpsest or surreal exquisite corpse of discrete edits and shoots; the director has explained in an afterword his long collective process. This is the beauty but also the remoteness of this filmmaker, who, coming into his own now, triumphs by being intractable and surprising, and has produced a rich and wonderful film that is as much to be cherished as it is off-putting.
Godland/Vanskabte land, 143 mins.;
Winter Brothers premiered at Locarno and
A White, White Day at International Critics' Week; this one moves up to Cannes Un Certain Regard, May 24, 2022, followed by dozens and dozens of international festival showings, starting in the US at Telluride. US limited theatrical release by Janus Films Feb. 3, 2023 (NYC), later in LA and nationwide in the spring. Now on Criterion Channel.
Metacritic rating: 81%.
FAQ
Search
Login
