Reykjavík Grapevine - 03.02.2017, Page 29

Consider this dilemma: You’re
thirteen. You’re offered a starring
role in a movie. But, you have to
spend much of the film in your
underwear being emotionally
vulnerable, and you have to kiss
another boy. “I would never have
done it myself,” says Guðmundur
Arnar Guðmundsson. “I would
have been like, ‘Fuck no!’” Yet as
the writer-director of ‘Hjartas-
teinn’ (“Heartstone”, in English),
he’s asked his young actors to do
all that, and more.
‘Hjartasteinn’, which is now
playing daily in Reykjavík with
English subtitles, is about two ad-
olescents riding an uncommonly
vertiginous hormonal roller coast-
er in an Icelandic fishing village.
Late-bloomer Þór (Baldur Ein-
arsson) waits to shower until the
rest of his friends are in the pool,
endures teasing from his older sis-
ters, and stews as they fight with
their single mother at the break-
fast table about her dating habits.
In the endless, shapeless days of
an Icelandic summer, he hangs
out with his best friend Kristján
(Blær Hinriksson), kicking the
windows out of derelict cars or
just walking around. Kristján is
tall and blonde, slender and broad-
shouldered—the girls plainly dig
him, including Þór’s crush. But his
own anguish seems deeper than
Þór’s angst, and there’s an edge
of romantic longing in his just-
kidding roughhousing with Þór.

Super heavy
Guðmundur grew up Reykjavík
and Þórshöfn, watching escapist
action films like ‘The Karate Kid’,
and became serious about film as
an art school student after being
“blown away” by Wong Kar-wai’s
‘Fallen Angels’ during a period of
directionlessness. He started out
making shorts, including Cannes
prizewinner ‘Hvalfjörður’, before
graduating to features, shooting
‘Hjartasteinn’ from a semi-autobi-
ographical script he’d been living
with for a decade.
Though ‘Hjartasteinn’ won
the Queer Lion award for the best
LGBT-themed film at the Ven-
ice Film Festival, and feels like a
coming-of-age coming-out tale,
it’s not told primarily through its
gay character. Partly, Guðmundur
explains, that’s because he was
writing about his own experience
of growing up, while watching
friends struggle with their sexu-
ality. He wanted the film to be
about friendship and small-town
life, too, he explains: “I've seen
so many arthouse coming-of-age
films that are super-heavy, that I
don’t think teenagers are able to
relate to. I wanted the film to be
fun, loving, and serious.”
Guðmundur honors the indi-
viduality of his each of his per-
formers—we get to know names
and faces, and empathise with
personalities, all over the town. At
two hours and ten minutes, ‘Hjar-
tasteinn’ doesn’t feel aggressively
long, but it is, for a film featuring
unknown actors enacting inti-
mate dramas in a language that’s
foreign to almost every moviegoer
in the world. Guðmunder and his
team knew the film would have
been more attractive to overseas
distributors at ninety minutes or
less. But everyone agreed that the
shorter versions, focused narrow-
ly on Þór and Kristján, felt pared-
down and monochromatic.

Private struggles
The film was shot mostly in Bor-
garfjörður Eystri, in East Iceland,
with a brief, tense detour to the
cliffs at Dyrhóaey, represented
as just a short, bumpy ride away.
The film is not set anywhere in
particular, and the time period is
somewhat free-floating—though,
consistent with Guðmundur’s own
adolescence, there are no cell-
phones in the film, and barely any
internet. He thinks of the conflicts
in ‘Hjartasteinn’ as personal, not
social. He’s seen Iceland become
far more accepting of queer people
over the past decades, he says, but
ultimately sees the real struggle
One From The Heart
‘Heartstone’ director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson comes of age
Words MARK ASCH Photo ART BICNICK