Icelandic
writer-director Hlynur Pálmason in only ten years with three features beneath
his belt, his latest feature being the ethereal and dreamy period drama Godland,
has already demonstrated a near-total mastery of the cinematic medium whose
work sits comfortably alongside the likes of Werner Herzog, Roy Andersson, Alexander
Sokurov and even Nuri Bilge Ceylan. From
the opening unprocessed 35mm frame to its dreamy closing images, Godland casts
a hypnotic spell over both the beleaguered protagonist and the viewer with its grandiose
vistas of 19th century Iceland untouched by humankind.
A modern-day Aguirre, the Wrath of God
for its sublimely beautiful yet uncompromising foray into madness and perhaps
murder, to see and hear Godland is more of an experience than a
conventional piece of storytelling while also being an evocative meditation on
a particular moment in time where timeless nature and modern man collided in
ways startling, sometimes shocking but hypnotizing. Your eyes feel like you’ve seen a slice of
Heaven.
Presented with two title cards (one in Danish, the other Icelandic) and opening on a text indicating the story was inspired by the discovery of 19th century Iceland involving glass plate photographs of people foraging there (in truth a fiction invented by the director), we find Danish priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) is tasked by his bishop with traveling to the country’s remote region of the southeastern coast to oversee the building of a church.
Traversing initially by sea and then by
horse, our hero travels across rugged mountain lands covered by green moss and
riverbeds, Lucas has a secret personal mission to capture the very first
photographs of the area using then-new glass-plate photographic
technologies. Working alongside his
translator (Hilmar Gudjónsson) is Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurðsson), a tough domineering
Icelandic guide who looms heavily over Lucas’ time there which includes a relationship
with a local parishioner’s daughter Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne). While laborers work steadily on constructing
the church, Lucas’ translator drowns and he finds himself slipping in and out
of madness as the angry and vengeful Ragnar turns up the heat and hatred
towards Lucas.
A joint coproduction between Iceland, Denmark, France and Sweden, this surreal and ethereal piece of historical fiction rests somewhere between the maddening indefatigability of nature against man seen in Aguirre, the Wrath of God with the sweeping majestic awe of Ron Fricke’s Baraka, sometimes letting imagery flow purely onscreen without any formal connective tissue. Despite being shot on unprocessed 35mm film replete with print damage or blemishes on the edges of the 1.33:1 academy ratio frame by Maria Von Hausswolff, the scope of the film is vast and beyond words. Take for instance a shot looking straight up at a mountain top peak as clouds pass through its green rocky terrain. Few if any films have shown Iceland with such an intimacy and palpable, tangible realism. While not a documentary, the naturalism onscreen has an Eden-esque beauty as well as a raw unforgiving harshness to the landscapes.
A pure cinema mood piece as historical drama, a majority of the films somber feeling of walking on a place in the Earth that feels closer to God stems from Last Lizard and Dirty Beaches Taiwanese-Canadian musician and actor Alex Zhang Hungtai. With a soft, mournful low hum radiating ambiently through the staggering vistas of green lands never traversed by humans, the score fluctuates between atonal jazz with a melancholic saxophone subtly wafting through the sad but very pretty scenery. In his seventh official film score, Hungtai’s music invokes a sense of isolation and desolation in a world perhaps intended to echo the Stations of the Cross themselves as the film’s depressed and lost protagonist seems to suffer one merciless natural as well as manmade hardship after another.
Inhabiting this wide open terrain, sometimes seen as tiny ants amid a rocky plant covered mountain, are brilliant performances from the film’s two central leads with Elliott Crosset Hove making the Danish priest in over his head and beleaguered while Ingvar Sigurðsson, the hero of the director’s previous film A White, White Day, is the logical physical embodiment of the undiscovered Iceland who is tickled pink to secretly torment the priest.
Bilingual, shifting throughout between Danish and Icelandic dialogue,
the crux of the film involves a growing feud between these two men which starts
out quiet but gradually escalates into violent confrontation. All the while, the priest Lucas’ faith is
continually tested by the harsh terrain and his increasingly cruel and
conniving guide who knows a lot more than he leads on. Though our hero comes into contact with a few
different characters, the world of the movie largely revolves around these two
ratcheting up the madness and mayhem for one another.
Released in 2022 at Cannes as well as the Toronto International Film Festival before making a small theatrical rollout in art houses, Godland while lengthy and perhaps long winded is truly a unique and impossibly beautiful film experience with moments that echo the spiritualism of Andrei Tarkovsky while ruminating on the towering madness of Werner Herzog.
A film intended to be
both a snapshot in a time long since surpassed by man as well as a peer into
then-present tensions between Denmark and Iceland, Godland functions both
as an involving character driven saga as well as a disconnected tapestry of
images of antiquity and natural wonderment.
The third feature by Hlynur Pálmason leaves an unshakable impression
that you’ve been at the epicenter of a transformative period between the two countries
as well as having caught a glimpse of what the world unfettered by humankind’s
ravages. The experience is merciless,
raw with the propensity to drive you insane but is also in its way cleansing.
--Andrew Kotwicki
