Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, France, 2022
Directed by Hylnur Pálmason
With Elliott Crosset Hove (Lucas), Ingvar Sigurdsson (Ragnar), Hilmar Guðjónsson (the interpreter), Jacob Lohmann (Carl), Vic Carmen Sonne (Ana), Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir (Ida)
Still images lie at the core of the moving picture – at least according to a title card shown at the beginning: it is the very existence of old photographs of the landscape and folks of the South-West of Iceland that prompted director Hylnur Pálmason to imagine what has been the identity and life of the photographer (actually, even these images spring from his imagination, inspiring him for his screenplay). This interest for old photographs has prodded him to shoot his film in the specific, 1.33:1 frame, reminiscent of such old images and the original format of cinema.
Actually very few photographs would feature in the editing: the film would rather show the sitters posing, waiting for Lucas to complete his odd technical task. At one point, as his personal tragedy is taking an even uglier turn, the journey he made and the pictures he took are recapped in a collection of those funny shots displaying people he met and wanted to shoot sitting for him, with powder in their face to keep the sun from making the face too dark and to allow the complexion look fresh on the glass plate, a moving series of serious faces that goes back in time till the first picture the film records Lucas taking, the portrait of the Danish bishop the young pastor assisted and scrupulously obeyed when the old man asked him to go to that distant corner of Iceland to build a church and a parish.
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It is thus the living subjects of the photographer, including the hectic, cosmic, lethal forces of nature, the film readily highlights and sympathizes with – the still images notionally at the source of the film and giving the photographer a precarious posterity are carefully stored away: they matter less than the life they were supposed to capture. It is not just that photographs may convey though fixity and immobility death. Or that they are just poses. Or too old. It is that they cannot tell much about the relation about the artist and his subject and this is precisely what the film wants to find about, to survey, to think about.
It could have moved down a complicated, though well-trodden, path meandering around faith and disbelief, religion and the lack of it. The missionary endeavor Lucas readily embraced seems to face challenges and temptations as the group of men and pack of horses he is supposed to lead move across a forbidding but fascinating nature. An erupting volcano is just a conspicuous danger: more troubling is the old guide, Ragnar, who is unfriendly and belligerent from the start, despising the Lutheran pastor, and who seems to be more deeply connected to the natural elements than to any credo, shot, wonderfully, and rightly, like an old pagan worshiper, a sorcerer from the past, a rock-solid presence unconcerned with Church rites. The nature he lives in has an arguably riveting and attractive power: witness the sequence when Lucas follows his interpreter and imitates him when he undresses and shouts primeval pleasure at the force and shine of a huge, powerful cascade – this sounds oddly more a surrendering to pagan beliefs than a decent acknowledgment to God’s creation, and the film cleverly emphasized the point as it crosscuts these shots in the wild with others showing Ragnar telling an eerie, disturbing story about a man finding eels while on a trip, having bad dreams from the discovery, getting afraid for his wife’s honor, feeling a curse upon him.
The tension between the pastor and the guide may the defining feature of the plot – they are always shot failing pathetically, and violently at times, to understand each other, squabbling and fighting, including with their fists. But it goes deeper than a clash between believing in a true God or not: pointedly a tragic event in the travel has altered the views of Lucas, making him forever resentful of Ragnar. It is the accidental death of the interpreter, a man Lucas liked a lot and is mourning a lot. The shock causes Lucas to get sick, to the point death seems ready to catch him, and to have delusions showing the interpreter still around the place.
This hatred is misplaced: the interpreter was trapped by too strong a whirl in a river that was too high to cross safely. Ragnar was against moving across the surging water but Lucas refused to lose more time to reach his destination. Moreover, the horse next to the interpreter did lose ground, jeopardizing further the rider, because the current made it impossible to carry any longer the huge wooden cross to be hammered on the church, a heavy and cumbersome object Ragnar from the start deemed impossible to move – once again, he was not listened. So the blame for the interpreter’s death can be squarely put on Lucas – and his hatred sounds like a stubborn attempt to dodge responsibility.
And his odd sense of responsibility and duties, his stern and unsympathetic manners stoke a fresh tension complicating his effort to fit in his new community: a Danish landowner, Carl, who extended a friendly hand and did his best to take care of the frail pastor, becomes more and more distrustful as he cannot understand Lucas’ temperament, rigidity, and real ambitions. And that the pastor is such a magnet to his daughters Ida and Ana is obviously not reassuring. When Carl guesses an improper relation is starting between Ana and Lucas, things are set to get out of hand.
So the path taken by the narrative does not really deal with a predictable clash of beliefs: it is the careful observation of how the nice-looking, resolute, quiet pastor, one trial after another, tension after tension, strays away from that initial, engaging image to project a disturbing image of a vexed, tormented, sour guy. The mission is an ordeal: it has brought many dangers and is feeding frustrations, righteousness giving way to confusion. And when he kills Ragnar, it is actually the final stretch of a long run downward evil and away from grace: the mission has not forged a new community, it has destroyed the missionary.
The reason why Lucas pounded on Ragnar and beat him to death, however, reveals what the film has wanted to examine. As he sits for a photograph, Ragnar starts to speak for a long time, in an articulate manner, in Danish, something he never wanted before, explaining what his childhood was and what the Danish language meant first and then telling far more horrible truths about his attitudes of the recent past. Ragnar’s hatred is the grievance of a people occupied by another – and the blunt, critical use of the national anthem of Denmark furthers later the point. Beyond religion and sentiments politics inform allegiances and antagonism, and it is remarkably complicated: after all Carl is a Dane, but points to Ida that the land he belongs to does not need more Lucas (meanwhile, Ana moves closer to Lucas as she lives hoping to be back to her Danish home and away from that Icelandic home).
The failure of Lucas’ mission is not just personal or religious: it is the failure of established authorities to lord over a population feeling estranged to them. His is also the story of a dying imperialism confronted with a nationalism proud of the past and eager for a future set and expressed on its own terms. “Godland” indeed takes place at the point in the 19th century when Denmark, who has been ruling Iceland since 1380, reluctantly grants more autonomy as the native go restive after nearly two centuries rife with disasters and crises, with an 18th century having been remarkably devastating (and the ambivalent legacy is reminded by the fact that after all the movie is released with three titles, in English, in Danish – Vanskabte Land – and in Icelandic – Volaða Land).
The pictures the director has conceived to retrieve the stories and history behind the trove of old photos that moved him are as elaborate and amazing as the narrative arc and underlying themes shaping that sad story of a youthful missionary zeal going astray, hopelessly and beyond remission. Pálmason’s camera lends a raw and yet poetic, majestic and yet unnerving quality to landscapes that are naturally awesome and superb. Nature is more than the telling and worrying receptacle of a human tragedy, it is also the metaphorical companion to the relentless and depressing nature of the narrative, a tale of decay and destruction, the unremitting eroding and stifling activity of natural forces, be it lava slowly decomposing or a horse’s body slowly decomposing or water swiftly carrying away life or light swiftly revealing the horror. This Hylnur Pálmason film, his third feature, is gorgeous, displaying a great flair and featuring great, moving visual ideas (like his peculiar, astonishing way to pan the camera, covering in one scene the bliss and bustle of a wedding ceremony or revealing the solitude of illness in a hostile land) while offering a subtly crafted critical analysis of the relation between a dominated culture and the dominating culture.