MOVIE REVIEWS

No vacation would be complete without at least one visit to the movies. We discovered an old-style cinema in Reykjavik showing classic Icelandic films with English subtitles and treated ourselves to two entries in their revolving repertoire.

The first one, Jar City, is a 2006 thriller based on Icelandic crime author Amaldur Indridason's 2000 novel of the same name. Jaded police detective Erlendur struggles to connect the murder of an elderly man with a rape that took place decades ago. What crime is committed and who is responsible were never in doubt for me. But the atmosphere is haunting (endless windswept vistas, dark city streets), and Erlendur's life is sufficiently bleak and unstable (due mainly to a drug-addled daughter he's trying to save from herself) to keep me on the edge of my seat.

Dark humor abounds, particularly in the form of Erlendur's junior partner, who claims to be a vegetarian and who is rebuffed as a soft-headed American when he tries to order a cappuccino at a coffee shop. Later on, he sits in a car, staking out a suspect, munching on a donut. So much for a healthy diet.

Speaking of which, Erlendur pulls up to a drive-in window and orders himself the aforementioned sheep's head to go. In the next scene, he tears it out of its styrofoam container, scoops out the eye first, and then licks his fingers.

There are menacing thugs and a perpetrator who is himself a victim.

Great fun but UGH! Apparently, the director Baltasar Kormakur is now filming an American version that takes place in Louisana.

The second movie is 101 Reykjavik (2000), the postal code for the downtown or "old city." All week long, our tour guide had been telling us tales of Icelandic bravery and ingenuity. So it was a great relief to discover that the country also has its share of slackers.

Hlynur is about to turn thirty. He lives with his mother, who is divorced from his alcoholic father. Hlynur has no prospects. He watches a lot of porn and goes bars. When someone asks him what he does with himself all day, he says, "nothing." Pressed to elaborate, he replies, "A nothing kind of nothing." The Icelandic welfare system supports him.

Everything changes when Lola comes into his life. She's a Spanish flamenco dancer/instructor with whom his mother has begun a relationship. During his mother's brief absence, Lola and Hylnur have drunken sex. Then she moves into his mother's apartment.

What's a boy to do?

It turns out that Lola is pregnant with his child. He's infatuated with her yet somehow manages to get his life together--sort of--by the end.

Hlynur's wry observations (about the similarities between his mother's new-found lesbianism and migratory birds) and his rich fantasy life (he imagines taking a machine gun to the members of his family who are literally boring him to death at a Christmas gathering) save the film from collapsing under the weight of its own whimsy.

Surprisingly, both of these movies were directed by Baltasar Kormakur, who also starred in the only other Icelandic movie I've ever seen, a gem entitled Devil's Island.


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