Iceland review - 2012, Qupperneq 12

10 ICELAND REVIEW
Sticky Situation
BLAck’S GAMe
Óskar Þór Axelsson
When the thriller Black’s Game (Svartur á leik) by director óskar Þór
axelsson opened in icelandic cinemas in March 2012, it became an
immediate hit with 60,000 tickets sold (that’s almost 20 percent of the
population). i too was tempted to see what all the fuss was about and was
thoroughly impressed, mainly by the performance of the three male leads.
Jóhannes haukur Jóhannesson is brilliant at comedy but proved to be
equally at ease in his role as the brutal and buff gang leader tóti. rising
star Þorvaldur davíð Kristjánsson convincingly portrayed the troubled and
torn youngster Stebbi, whose inner demon gets him caught up in a sticky
situation, and damon younger really made me detest the twisted and
ruthless Brúnó. Based on a novel by Stefán Máni, Black’s Game belongs to
a new generation of dark icelandic thrillers, in which each new film has to
top the next in terms of sex, drugs and violence. the movie is fast-paced,
keeping the viewers on the edge of their seats. My attention certainly never
trailed off, although i generally prefer a clever plot that riddles the mind to
a ride on the superhighway to destruction. however, the film also includes
a hint of a love story and the ending is sure to leave viewers with a lot of
questions. overall, Black’s Game is a solid thriller, featuring a star league of
icelandic actors—unlikely to disappoint fans of the genre. ESA
04
Culture Club
05
the ProfuSion of the Meandering Mind
from the mouth of the WhALe
Sjón
From the Mouth of the Whale, the second novel by the icelandic writer Sjón
to be translated into english, was shortlisted for the independent foreign
fiction prize for 2012. the story is set in seventeenth-century iceland, the
pre-enlightenment period when science was just beginning to challenge
religious authority. the protagonist and narrator, Jónas pálmason the
learned, is a self-taught healer who is exiled for blasphemy and sorcery
to a desolate island in the year 1635. Jónas is steeped in the superstition
and lore of his time, predominantly Catholicism and an embryonic science
that sought to understand the world through cataloguing all its wonders.
Jonas’s fantastical story is told as a stream of consciousness that reveals his
meandering mind. he tells of his career as a healer of women’s diseases, his
struggle to conquer a gruesome ghost, the deaths of his children, and his
exile. in typical postmodern style, the characters in Sjón’s book overlap, and
time and boundaries blur and fade with tantalizing surrealistic echoes. and
the language of this translation is so rich that it evokes a kind of alchemy in
which the original wonder becomes a new kind of wonder. AS