Hlylnur Palmeson's Whiter Whiter Day (2019) is a fierce and unsettling portrait of man losing his sanity as a result of grief and jealousy. The picture is excellent, if disturbing, and some of the sequences in the film embed themselves in your imagination. Reviewers suggest that the film is difficult to watch because of its pacing. These critics have spent too much time marinating in American big budget films. The picture always carries its film-rhetorical strategies to their logical conclusions and, sometimes, this results in sequences and images that deviate from what we expect -- this is a good thing and evidence of Palmason's integrity and courage. A good example of the director extending an cinematic idea to its logical conclusion is a startling sequence in the middle of the movie. The hero, an anguished Icelandic cop named Ingimundur, is driving through white mist with his eight-year old granddaughter, Salka. (The film is replete with scenes of cars driving, always too fast it seems, through freezing white mist.) Ingimudur's car hits something in the road. He stops and gets out and finds a big boulder inexplicably lying in the middle of his lane. Ingimundur is at the end of his tether and he ferociously kicks the boulder to the side of the road and, then, hefts it off the highway. What follows is astonishing: from fixed vantages in the landscape, we see the boulder rolling down the steep hillside, hopping over obstacles, and plunging from cliffs. There are about six shots that show the boulder spinning end-over-end as it traverses the steep green slopes all cloaked in mist. Then, the boulder dives from a cliff and falls for a long time through open air. At last, we see the boulder sinking through green water. A final shot shows the boulder coming to a stop finally, resting on the bottom of the sea among florid green sea weed. It's an extraordinary sequence and, of course, non-narrative. Palmason's point is that inexplicable things happen -- as we drive over the highway, a big rock is not where it is supposed to be and nearly causes us to crash. The hero's rage at the road-hazard is palpable and clearly transferred from his frustrated anger at the situation in which he finds himself. And, once, he sets the rock rolling, in motion on the steep shaggy hillside, he has initiated a process that has no possible ending but the rock dropping out of control until it ends up on the bottom of the sea. This is an unsettling symbol for the alarming processes we see in the movie.
In the opening shot, the camera tracks a vehicle speeding over slick, curving mountain roads. After about 80 seconds, the car crashes through a guardrail and vanishes from the frame. The air is congested with icy mist. The now empty shot lasts another ten seconds. Ingimundur's wife was in the car and she dies in the crash. The film, then, uses another interesting strategy to show the passage of time. A montage of about 20 shots follows, all filmed from the same location -- these shots show some rural structures with little, furry Icelandic horses grazing around them. The horses come and go; sometimes there is rain; sometimes snow. At first, we think the shots are designed to show us seasons passing but this is not the case -- quickly, we come to understand that although the shots measure duration, they don't do so according to any clear paradigm. Time seems to sometimes slow down and speed up. Ingimudur, we learn is one of three cops in a small village next to big fjord flanked by a huge, barren mountain. He is planning to renovate the farm in the country -- actually it's all empty country -- so that his daughter and her somewhat feckless husband can live with Ingimundur's much-beloved grandchild in that home. We see him tearing out walls, installing windows, working on the roof where he hits his thumb with the hammer and the camera patiently shows us a blood blister growing under this thumbnail. Sometimes, Ingimudur has therapy session by Skype with an earnest mental health counselor. Gradually, he comes to suspect that his deceased wife was having an affair with another man in the tiny community. Ingimundur, like a good police officer, starts gathering evidence. Ultimately, he concludes that his suspicions are true. During a Skype session with the therapist, he goes berserk with rage and wrecks his office (at the police station) and the computer that he is using for his therapy. When the other two police appear for a sort of "wellness" check, called by the therapist who seems to be in some other city, Ingimundur assaults his two colleagues, pepper sprays them in the face, and, then, sets out on his vendetta against his wife's lover. He picks up the man, takes him out in the country, where he has dug an open grave and makes the man sit in the pit. Ingimundur tells him that if he lies about the affair, he will shoot the man in the belly and bury him alive in the grave. From here, things go from bad to worse. Ingimundur's violent behavior has horrified his little granddaugher and there is a very upsetting scene where he rants at her while she struggles to hold back tears. Ultimately, we see the old man carrying his granddaughter on foot through an endless tunnel bored through one of the mountains, a long black corridor that has a metaphorical function. Ingimundur is on foot because a landslide has cut off car access to this endless tunnel, probably a road that dives under a fjord to reach the villages on the other side of the mountains. In a final scene, scored to Leonard Cohen's "Memories" (an uncharacteristic song for the artist exuberantly produced by Phil Spector), the film's epigraph is materialized: "On a white day when there is no difference between land and sky and all objects vanish, the dead will come and speak to us." On the tune's saxophone solo, the camera moves closer and closer to Ingimundur who has a faint smile on his face and the film ends.
The picture uses various narrative strategies that are striking and ingenious. At one key point, the movie shows us a montage of all the characters in the film, looking straight into the camera, including the big chunk of basalt resting in the middle of the highway and an image that we don't recognize -- it's the grave dug in the meadow. The little girl watches some sort of children's show, full of resurrected dead people, and big billowing fields of color. The scene in the tunnel goes on and on, a hellish sequence in which voices echo off the slimy-looking black walls of the underground corridor. Ingimundur says that "Sometimes I'm a monster" and we know this to be true when he tells Salka a gory and disgusting ghost story involving sheep liver -- the story is too intense for the child who is very sick, but Ingimundur, like the rock rolling down the mountainside, is not going to desist from the tale until he has thoroughly terrorized his daughter. A White White Day is an excellent picture in all respects and, indeed, even very suspenseful in conventional terms and it is highly recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment