Something fun to go see
(I think I told you I really enjoyed NOI, another recent Icelandic movie that just came out on video)
Seagull's Laughter, The (2001)(Widescreen)
American actresses have long complained that there are no plum roles in Hollywood. At least that appears to be true in mainstream fare, where too often the only options for leading ladies are scripts built around women looking for the right guy without actually knowing they're looking for the right guy—witless atrocities like Sweet Home Alabama and the almost more ridiculous Runaway Bride. It's your basic marketable box-office dreck about so-called quirky females who have all the resources in the world but still don't know what the hell they want out of life—well, until the right guy comes along and everything falls magically into place.
If Agust Gudmundsson's The Seagull's Laughter, which undoes all of the above notions of how women think and feel, is any indication, Iceland is one place leading ladies can go to get juicy roles based on living, breathing human females.
Freyja is the main character in Gudmundsson's beautifully shot black comedy about a prodigal niece who returns to her small Icelandic hometown after possibly murdering her American husband, and she is truly a woman's woman. Set in tiny, snow-covered Hafnarfjordur, Iceland, in the early 1950s, this is no gee-I-can't-choose-between-one-charmed-life-and-another comedy, but a film about a completely real woman—and a spectacularly sexpot-ish one, too—who knows what she wants and how to get it. But the fiercely intelligent Freyja's agenda, that of being true to herself, is a radical one. And that the film is set in the '50s only serves to point up the disturbing notion that even in the present day a woman being utterly true to herself is a radical notion. Julia Roberts, in nearly any of her movies, would have to agree.
The role of Freyja calls for a very special and daring type of actress, one who knows how to (and is not afraid to) walk the line between being morally questionable and utterly sympathetic. Margret Vilhjalmsdottir is so flawless in the role that it's startling to see her in the DVD's making-of feature and realize she's actually someone other than the beguiling and complex Freyja.
But it's not just the strong female lead that makes this movie work so well. The scope of the picture is small, but still the plot progresses along unpredictable lines—midway through, you get that giddy feeling that, here, anything goes—and in the end the film's themes are much larger than the tiny setting and insular plot would seem to permit.
It's true that the supporting characters' stories all revolve around Freyja's comings and goings pretty much the entire time, but no one is given short shrift here, not exactly anyway. And the film's other star, Ugla Egilsdóttir, who had never acted before, is terrific as Agga, Freyja's mistrusting young cousin, for whom all of life is built on drama and suspicion. Agga is an unflinchingly disloyal girl who neither likes nor trusts her snowy little hamlet nor the people in it, least of all Freyja—all of Agga's mistrust is funneled into one notion, that Freyja is evil incarnate. And she tries at every turn to cause trouble for her. But as Agga attempts to send Freyja away to prison, or worse, it becomes clear pretty quickly that if her older cousin had not happened on the scene, Agga would have little to no excitement in her life. And she needs excitement: Freyja is complex, but Agga is enigmatic and chillingly decisive. Beyond the reaches of the film's story, you can imagine she'll grow up to be something utterly more intense, strong, intelligent, and unknowable than Freyja could ever be. And that's saying something—Freyja's power is huge.
The DVD release of The Seagull's Laughter contains only a few extras. The making-of feature is definitely a delight to watch, except that it ends so abruptly as to seem cut down the middle. Other than that, there are a half-dozen deleted scenes, only one of which, with Agga and the town police officer, adds to the story. Lastly, there are several charming TV plugs for the movie, all with the same catchy theme music.
But it's not for the extras that you'll want to get a copy of this DVD: it's for the acting, the story, the script, and the cinematography, which, like the plot, is full of welcome surprises. Over the course of the film, the camerawork goes from spare, tight interior and exterior shots (lots of stairwells, alcoves, and claustrophobically narrow streets) to breathtakingly gorgeous landscapes burnished with winter light. If you have a chance to see this on the big screen at your town's art-house theater, make it happen. The landscape is so compellingly beautiful and startling, you may find yourself looking into cheap fares to Reykjavik so that you can puddle-jump to Hafnarfjordur (perhaps sitting next to a hopeful Hollywood starlet practicing the declension of Icelandic nouns).
The Seagull's Laughter is a film about strong, sexy, complex women that will leave you delighted and slightly stunned. In the end, it's not about whether or not someone's moral fiber is or is not intact, though that's certainly part of it; it's about that still largely untapped resource: a daring and regenerate thing called the female spirit.
— FRANNY FRENCH |
