Reykjavík Grapevine - 06.01.2017, Síða 44

Movie Saga of Icelandic Cinema44
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 01 — 2017
In 1989, Jim Jarmusch was unable
to attend the Reykjavík Film Festi-
val screenings of ‘Mystery Train’.
In his stead, he sent producer Jim
Stark, who ended up hitting it off
with Friðrik Þór Friðriksson, at
once the leading luminary and the
enfant terrible of Iceland’s bur-
geoning film scene: the festival’s
precocious founder, in the years
leading up to the creation of the
Icelandic Film Fund, and the di-
rector of the controversial punk
documentary ‘Rokk í Reykjavík’
(see issue 9, 2016). By then, Friðrik
Þór’s early work had gained him an
appreciative audience on the in-
ternational festival circuit. Stark
liked Friðrik Þór’s fiction debut
‘White Whales’, which told the vi-
olence-tinged story of two fisher-
man ashore in Reykjavík in a style
compared to Jarmusch’s hipster-
Ozu deadpan. In 1991, his ‘Children
of Nature’ would be nominated for
the Best Foreign Language Film
Oscar (a feat still unrivaled in Ice-
landic cinema). Friðrik Þór’s film
riffed on Ozu’s ‘Tokyo Story’ and
Wim Wenders’s ‘Wings of Desire’
to tell a story of Iceland’s urban-
ization, with a whiff of road-movie
mysticism he would eventually re-
fine further in 1995’s ‘Cold Fever’,
cowritten by Stark.
As Friðrik Þór relates in inter-
views, he and Stark had got to talk-
ing about doing something with
the actor Masatoshi Nagase, who
plays one of the Japanese tourists
adrift in Memphis in ‘Mystery
Train’. Inspired by a stray news
item, they finally came up with a
story in in which Nagase’s char-
acter reluctantly travels to North
Iceland to perform a memorial
ritual for his drowned parents. In
the dead of winter.
Twenty-plus years on, ‘Cold
Fever’, the dialogue of which is
mostly in global English, reads
as a wonderfully knowing tour-
ist’s-eye-view of Unique Iceland.
Many of the jokes are evergreen:
The Blue Lagoon of 1995 is quaint,
small and foggy, but the sign
commanding international visi-
tors to shower, with red patches
over head, feet, armpit and geni-
tals, is unchanged. The snow-
blown roads are all but empty of
visitors, though, except for a few
disreputable American hitchhik-
ers Nagase picks up (Fisher Ste-
vens and Lili Taylor, wonderfully
mixing neurosis and aggression).
It’s practically a Wild West—or a
great beyond. Of course he gets
spectacularly lost (like many of
today’s guests, he ignores road-
closure signs), and has encounters
from the cosy to the cosmic: from
the quirky bar where he’s intro-
duced to Brennevin and sheep’s
testicles, to the shores of a glacial
lagoon, where a wild-haired girl
restarts his junky Citroën with
her elf-like shriek.
Now, even perfectly unmystical
contemporary Icelandic films, like
‘Bakk’ and ‘Á annan veg’, use the
Icelandic highway as a metaphor.
(The Ring Road leads out into wide
open spaces… right back to where
you started.) And the more spiritu-
al odyssey of ‘Cold Fever’ can hard-
ly be accused of peddling an in-
authentic export-only view of the
country. Friðrik Þór’s eye for the
landscape’s frosty negative space
gives the objective natural beauty
a personal, mysterious twist (fur-
ther emphasized by the wintry,
chiming score from Hilmar Örn
Hilmarsson, the ‘Rokk í Reykjavík’
punk turned Ásatrú pagan). And
the style, quizzical observational
comedy and slow-motion slap-
stick, is international. The per-
formers, foreign and domestic, are
given space to project personality
in unpredictable directions—in-
cluding the great Japanese director
Seijun Suzuki, twinkling in a rare
acting role. Whether you’ve never
been to Iceland, or are totally over
it, watching ‘Cold Fever’ you’ll un-
derstand what it feels like to be lost
in translation.
How to watch: US, UK and Icelandic
DVD editions of the film are available
from online retailers internationally
and public libraries in Iceland.
SHARE: gpv.is/sic01
‘Cold Fever’
Words MARK ASCH
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