In the Icelandic landscapes that loom large in Nietzchka Keene's The Juniper Tree, there are no bushes, no shrubs, and only a single tree -- and that tree is magical, grown from a dead child's finger. Although Iceland may have been wooded before it was settled in the 9th century, its forests were cut down and the island was without woods for a thousand years; there are some trees in a cemetery at Rekyavik (I've walked among them) and a little grove on a hilltop overlooking town, but these were planted in the last century. The terrain is meadow, bare rock mountains, and ice-cap. So, the notion of a tree growing in Iceland, particularly a juniper, is incongruous -- the story is an adaptation of a Grimm's fairy tale and, in fact, the titular tree seems particularly uncanny in the context of stony wastelands shown in the film.
Nietzchka Keene was a film and video artist associated with University of Wisconsin in Madison. (She was apparently friends with Lorrie Moore, the famous short-story writer, who taught for a time on that campus) She died at a relatively young age, a victim of pancreatic cancer, after making three feature films (the first, The Juniper Tree was released in 1990). If The Juniper Tree is representative (and it seems to be), her films are resolutely non-commercial -- she uses stark black and white with very long takes. She doesn't have the budget to move the camera, although her esthetic would probably prohibit any kind of showy photography even if the budget were available. The Juniper Tree is mostly silent: people whisper incantations and sing ancient keening folk songs. Keene isn't interested in conventional narrative and the film elides over important events and seems muddled with respect to its presentation of space and time -- this is consistent with the movie's rough-hewn primitivist sensibility. The Juniper Tree is mostly known today because of the startling performance that it boasts from the 12 year old Bjork Gudmundsdottir. It's probably wrong to say that Bjork performs, like the rest of the small cast she is simply posed against the brutal-looking sub-Arctic terrain, but there is something unearthly about her appearance. The film didn't make much of an impression in 1990 when it was premiered at South by Southwest and played Sundance. In some ways, it was significantly ahead of its time -- recent movies like The Lighthouse and The Witch by Robert Eggers and some of Kelly Reichardt's minimalist films (particularly Meeks' Cutoff) embody the esthetic exemplified by The Juniper Tree; these pictures involve small isolated groups of people exposed to the elements and facing uncanny aspects of the landscape -- the pictures are adventures in hermit-paranoia. (I note that Eggers' new film also will feature Bjork.) Movies of this sort are a matter of taste -- I thought The Juniper Tree was very slow-paced and that the narrative was unnecessarily confusing, but the picture's stark and uncompromising sensibility gradually persuaded me that the movie was worth watching.
Two girls wander around a particularly desolate part of south Iceland. Their mother has been stoned first, and, then, burned as a witch. The oldest girl, who seems to be about 25, thinks of herself as a witch as well and believes that she is capable of magic. There is a consequence for this kind of credulity -- in a remarkable early shot, we see a corpse sunk in an icy-looking tarn on the heath, an image of a Scandinavian "bog body" with bound hands and a toque, someone who has been killed on suspicion of witchcraft. The people are nominally Christians but it's pretty obvious that their Christian beliefs are not even skin-deep. The witch seduces a man whose wife has recently died. The man, Johan, has a little boy named Jonas. Jonas who is about ten is the same approximate age as Margit, the younger sister. The Grimm brothers collected ancient folk stories and these often feature the motif of the evil stepmother. In folk tale inventories, the plot type of the narrative of this sort of story is often labeled "My mother killed me; my father ate me" and this is an accurate short-hand description of the last half hour of the ninety minute movie. The older sister uses some kind of fertility magic and becomes pregnant. Her husband's son, Jonas, dislikes her and spends his afternoons decorating his mother's grave in a particularly desolate lava field near where the family lives as virtual troglodytes in peat-roofed shacks dug into a stony hillside. The elder sister tries various kinds of enchantments and, perhaps, even attempts to bewitch the little boy. But, as we gradually grasp, the older girl is just a poseur -- it's the 12 year old Margit who has the real supernatural powers. The weird landscape is haunted by the ghost of Margit's dead mother; she leads her daughter through ghostly geyser fields and behind the veil of falling water (at the famous Seljandfoss about two hours drive along the south coast from Rekyavik). The mother can't speak -- Margit says the dead are silent. Several times, she bares her breast to show a black void --when Margit sticks her hand into the black void, the image dissolves into shots of sea-birds and the stony moors of the Icelandic highlands. Somehow, she bears within herself a nightmarish emptiness which is expressed by the forbidding landscape as well. The eldest daughter, married to the widower, is pregnant and says she will bear the man a son. But, she seems to think she has to get rid of the little boy, her husband's heir by his first wife. She lures the little kid up to a mountain top and taunts him to fly away like a bird. The little boy thinks that his mother, who may also have been a witch, has enchanted him so that he can fly. The child plunges off the cliff and dies. The wicked stepmother than cuts off his finger and sews his mouth shut and, then, sinks the corpse in a icy -looking lagoon. (Why does she sew his mouth shut? We have already learned that, in witch lore, the "dead can't speak.") Back at home, the evil stepmother serves her family a mutton stew flavored with the little kid's finger. Margit fishes out the boiled finger and takes it to the grave of the little boy's mother. She plants the finger and it germinates (in the matter of a single day) into a juniper tree. The evil stepmother, having accomplished her inscrutable revenge, rides away on a little Icelandic pony. The next day, the father also leaves the farmstead, riding his pony in pursuit of her. The murdered boy is reincarnated as a shaggy, sinister-looking raven and this bird of ill omen sits in the juniper tree with Margit leaning against its trunk next to the grave.
The film is equipped with an epigraph from T. S. Eliot that doesn't add anything to the story -- it's about bones strewn under a juniper tree. There are several startling shots -- the little boy's corpse under water with fish nibbling at his lips sewn shut and a dead lamb that floats in the icy water of a frightening-looking glacial river. Embedded in the story is another folk tale about a swan maiden married to a mortal man who gives birth to a tiny boy all covered in feathers -- the story is pretty much a non sequitur but it contributes to the bleak, eerie mood. The film is picturesque in a stark and unrelenting way, but it doesn't really tell us that much about human nature -- I can't avoid the sense that the movie is sort of irrelevant to most of what concerns us.
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