There’s a scene about halfway through this disturbing but frustrating Icelandic film that puts everything before and after in such plain perspective that it threatens to upend the whole meaning of the production. A young Danish clergyman, Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), charged with building a church in a remote village on the Iceland coast in the late 1800s, is talking to his host, Carl (Jacob Lohmann), a fellow Dane and the nominal leader of the village, about the arduous journey the priest and his entourage of locals experienced in order to reach the village, a journey that claimed the life of at least one man and several pack animals. Carl asks, with genuine curiosity, why Lucas chose to sail to the opposite end of the island country and then travel on foot and horseback for weeks through forbidding terrain when he could have more easily sailed directly from Denmark to the village. Though we already know Lucas’s answer (“I want to get to know the country,” is how he explained it to his superior back in Denmark), the stark logic of Carl’s question injects another one into the viewer’s head: Why did the movie’s director, Hylnur Pálmason, put his protagonist through such hell based on such a flimsy rationale? Obviously, because he wanted to test the man, and show off Iceland’s unique landscape in the process.

There’s no getting around the effectiveness of this plot device—much of the first half of Godland (a purposefully ironic title) is a cinematic essay in how a natural environment can be at once monumentally beautiful and mortally terrifying—but given how the trip changes Lucas, whose religious piety is a manifestation of his privileged arrogance, the calculation on Pálmason’s part feels equally arrogant. The director compounds this connection by affecting ethnographic documentary qualities, such as a 4:3 aspect ratio and occasional scratches on a non-existent film surface. The analog between Lucas and Pálmason is further enhanced by the former’s avocation, photography, which necessitates the portage of a huge box camera, not to mention a crate of glass plates, over mountains and through raging rivers, just so that he can record the virgin country, usually with a local stevedore hired for the journey adding the human dimension. But the first inkling of Jacob’s overall attitude toward his fellow humans is his petulant reluctance to learn Icelandic (there are apparently as many ways to say “shut up” as there are words for “rain”), a trait that annoys his guide, Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurdsson), a burly, older man of endless resource whose temperament is to question the existence of anything he can’t see, smell, touch, or hear—like God. Though Ragnar saves Jacob’s life, after they arrive at their destination and he supervises the building of a church he would never attend, the enmity between the two men only becomes more intense. 

Pálmason’s narrative style is elliptical, so when Carl’s two daughters show up on screen without introduction it takes a few scenes to establish not only their relationship to each other, but their meaning within the story. The younger girl, Ida (Ida Mekkin Hlynsdóttir, the director’s daughter), exudes a weirdly cosmopolitan sensibility in the way she addresses Jacob about the religious versus the secular life, and while she does it to gauge his compatibility as a mate for her older sister, Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne), it’s obvious that such a match would never go over with Carl, who tolerates Jacob’s seething resentment of everything this place represents simply because he has to keep the village together—religion is something the Danish expats feel they need. But none of this melodramatic business gets at the heart of the hatred between Jacob and Ragnar, which is elemental under such circumstances, and by the time their conflict reaches its violent resolution you may wonder why, just as with Jacob’s preferred sea route, the movie couldn’t have gotten to where it was going with less fuss. 

In Danish and Icelandic. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Godland home page in Japanese

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