Reykjavík Grapevine - 23.09.2016, Page 28

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Film 28
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 15 — 2016
Didda Jónsdóttir, who has played a
frizzy-haired, pot-smoking hippie in
three films by Solveig Anspach, re-
members the first time she met her
director. It was at the local swimming
pool, Laugardalslaug, when they were
both girls.
Didda and I are talking about
Solveig’s film ‘The Aquatic Effect’, a
movie about swimming pools, swim-
ming lessons, lifeguards and life it-
self. The last film by the Iceland-born,
France-based Solveig, who died of
cancer last summer after the film’s
completion, ‘The Aquatic Effect’ will
be the Opening Night film at this
year’s Reykjavík International Film
Festival, on 29 September. Solveig’s
fi lms feature water, water every-
where, as regular RIFF moviegoers
remember from 2013’s ‘Lulu in the
Nude’ (with its evocative, transfor-
mative seaside locations) and 2012’s
‘Queen of Montreuil’ (whose heroine
at one point shares a bathtub with a
sea lion).
I suggest to Didda that her story of
Solveig at the pool suggests the heavy
hand of fate, or at least a very poet-
ic aptness. She avers: “Sometimes I
think, Wow! Am I making this up?”
But Didda vividly recalls Solveig’s
mother, with red hair and freckles,
like Didda—a kindred spirit, if only
in the younger bather’s mind. Solveig
was forever a foreigner: an Icelander
in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil,
where she lived and worked as an
adult; a Frenchwoman in Iceland. “If
you’re a little bit out there,” says Did-
da, “she picked up on that.”
Which brings us back, once more,
to the water, the stuff of life. In ‘The
Aquatic Effect’, crane operator Samir
(Samir Guesmi) develops a crush on
the lifeguard Agathe (Florence Loiret
Caille), and takes swim lessons in or-
der to get closer—not telling her he
can already swim. Lifeguarding and
swim lessons become a metaphor for
trust in a relationship—and then for
risk-taking, as Samir follows Agathe
to Iceland for an international life-
guarding conference(!), posing as an
Israeli delegate with a firm belief that
public pools can bring peace to the
Middle East.
Solveig “wasn’t an extrovert,” says
Didda, but nevertheless, “she trusted
people. She trusted the humanity of peo-
ple. She wished people would talk, and
love, and stop being stupid. Water was
her way of telling us that we are all made
of the same substance.”
A Grand Adventure
The whimsical yet straightfaced sce-
nario of ‘The Aquatic Effect’ is char-
acteristic of Solveig’s films, which
embrace human quirk and unlikely
situations with a sweet sense of hu-
mour and a serious empathy. The
everyday emotional ups and downs
which may mean the world to us,
but which we would never think of
as cinematic, have the potential, in
Solveig’s films, to break out into a
grand adventure. In particular, writes
the American critic Scout Tafoya in
a 2015 tribute, “She addressed issues
facing middle aged women: feelings
of inferiority, mental and physical
deterioration, abuse, the increasing
difficulty of social lives with age,” and
yet her movies “boil over with life so
rich and full it gets tangled.”
The French scenes in ‘The Aquat-
ic Effect’ were shot in Solveig’s lo-
cal pool, in Montreuil; many of the
people in the film are people from her
own life, and a number of the charac-
ters recur: Didda’s character, Anna,
was the protagonist of Solveig’s 2008
film ‘Back Soon’, and appeared along-
side Agathe and Samir in ‘Queen of
Montreuil’. Solveig premiered her
first dramatic feature, the serious,
semiautobiographical cancer film
‘Haut les coeurs!’ in 1999, a couple
years shy of her 40th birthday; unlike-
ly new beginnings ultimately became
her great subject in films like ‘Queen
of Montreuil’, about an early wid-

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GPV.IS/SOLV15
Words MARK ASCH Photos ART BICNICK
Last Splash
RIFF opens with Solveig Anspach’s
farewell film ‘The Aquatic Effect’