Reykjavík Grapevine - 24.06.2005, Blaðsíða 45

45
Dark Horse:
Boy Meets Girl Raises the Stakes in Icelandic Cinema
Boy meets girl. How liberating can the
formula be in 2005? Very. The film, titled
Voksne mannesker in Danish (Grown-up
People) but a tad more irritatingly Dark
Horse in English, brought this particular
viewer absolute cinematic joy, perhaps
more so than any Icelandic director’s film
before it.
“When you start speaking of A-taxes
and B-taxes, my sight goes black and I
want to die” are the approximate first
words of the film, told by its hero, the
slacker graffiti-artist Daniel, confronted
with “grown-up” reality in a tax office.
We follow him and his Laurel&Hardy
companion on to the point of meeting
The Girl, with particular consequences
upon which the hero acts. Sorry for
the vague summary of the story, but it
would be a shame to spoil this film with
particulars.
The small, often tremendously comical
situations, gestures and reactions that
make up the film lead to a point where
all the hero’s and viewer’s emotion and
existential crises pour into the image of
a car halted as a capsule bridge lifts, then
recedes; at which point the viewer might,
just might, lose all sense of self, observing
the pure mechanic movement, wake up
again and follow Daniel onto a bright new
Tati future.
This film is a film, sure, but let’s
contextualize. World cinema: This is a
Pinocchio sort of love story, full of French
New Wave, not merely stylistically but in
spirit. The filmmaker says he’s “nodding
his head” to a particular Godard film, but
both Truffaut and Buñuel are just around
the corner, as is Kieslowski in a parallel
story running through half the film, Tati
in the final scene, etc. – cinema history,
however, does not become a burden here,
it’s merely the etymology of a language the
director quite fluently speaks.
In the context of Icelandic cinema in
general, this film has liberating aspects.
There are no mountains in it – none
at all. In its production questions of
nationality seem to have been considered
as irrelevant as they are to the story told:
a story of city-life. Only a decade ago,
people’s main worry when Friðriksson’s
highly recommendable Cold Fever was
premiered, was that it displayed a distorted
image of Iceland and its inhabitants.
Cinema was given a representative role for
state and nation. Perhaps Cold Fever was
a pivotal point in that respect; ten years
later, in any case, Dark Horse bears no
such perverse burden, it is cinema.
As compared with Dagur Kári’s
celebrated debut, Nói Albinói, Dark
Horse involves the same subtle humour
and eccentric out-of-place main character.
But the film, as well as its main character,
is more at ease with its eccentricities here,
than was Nói. There is a tremendous
lightness to this film, replacing both
Nói’s claustrophobic isolation and the
elegant but rigorous and sometimes over-
conscious and stiff, frame designs.
Whereas Nói Albinói fulfilled
expectations created by Dagur Kári’s short
films, one is tempted to declare that finally
Dagur Kári has exceeded them.
Voksne mannesker (Dark Horse) is showing
at Háskólabíó, with an English-subtitled
screening once a day.
Review by Haukur Mar Helgason