Icelanders strike again: WOMAN AT WAR (KONA FER Í STRÍÐ)

WOMAN AT WAR (Kona fer í stríð) (2018)

A gallery of grotesque and very human characters,

skies and faces blown by the wind,

and many many many sheep 
to animate the landscape:

the Icelandic Benedikt Erlingsson returned 

to the 24th Sarajevo Film Festival 

with another surreal comedy in “Woman at War”.

A few years ago he won hearts with his series of vignettes 

collected under the title “Of Horses and Men”.

With this mini-saga about a middle-aged choir mistress with a sideline in eco-terrorism,

he has ventured 

into more traditional storytelling,

but retained a wacky sort 

of an outsider humour.

Anchored by the brilliant and bold interpretation of the actress Halldóra Geirharodsdottir,

the film tells of the implications that individual initiative can have when fighting

the neoliberal monster

and the social stereotypes.

We are reminded of the ideas of Foucault or David Harvey,

as well as of the acts of terrorism and vandalism from films like “Die Dritte Generation” (1979) and “Night Moves” (2013).

Just that here all happens in an icelandic comic key that never loses its depth or anger.

Halla uses her bow and arrows to bring down high-voltage power lines connected to the aluminium smelters feeding off Iceland's geothermal energy.

 Nobody knows who she is.

Apart from the jazz band and the open-throat singers

who appear in key moments on screen

as melodic commentators,

fellow conspirators,

and sympathetic bystanders

offering accompaniment to some of the action.

They keep popping up in the sphagnum

like Greek choruses.

Like I said, it's wacky. 

Meanwhile, good-hearted Halla has been trying for years to adopt a Ukrainian war orphan.

 Just as she gets the news that a child is waiting for her,

the law closes her in.

On her terrorist actions she is shot from slightly below.

As she gazes up at the electricity cables above, she looks like Joan of Arc in a woolly jumper.

Geirharðsdóttir engages in a very physically demanding role.

Halla spends a lot of time bounding across volcanic crags

 and evading the surveillance helicopters which hunt her. 

Later on she saves herself

by hiding

under the fleece of a dead sheep,

just as in the previous film there was a horse lending its carcass

as a saving shelter.

And the Ulysses' Homeric stratagem comes to mind.

Erlingsson is also making fun

of what is probably an unheard of news for the Icelandic citizen,

given the wide natural spaces available and the reduced demographic pressure.

He ironizes the obsession of the contemporary Western citizens

to be an object of control,

from spy satellites, cameras closed circuit, drones.

He is also self quoting his pervious work by

bringing back the character of the Argentine tourist (Juan Camillo Roman Estrada).

He is here hilariously targeted due to its obvious extraneousness to the context,

subject to numerous checks of the local police.

The purpose of laughter here is to exorcise what may be the result of an ambient catastrophism.

Thus, the spectator laughs to see the same character being continually arrested instead of Halla. 

All these mishaps, however,

are the result of decisions made by a political regime that allows arbitrary arrests and stereotyping.

In the same logic,

the viewer is as suspicious as the heroine,

and becomes as paranoid as she is.

Halla will manage to do it all, of course. 

She blows up her last pylon, 

escapes and collect her new daughter.

It is a delight to always feel the fun the filmmaker and his team had while making “Woman at War”!

A comedy that manages to use a classic narrative,

including the two contrasting missions of the protagonist (the ecologist and the mother),

her helpers (sister, mole, cousin and landscape),

his bitter opponents (technology, politicians), 

but it bathes it an all-Icelandic humor.

A film that continuously oscillates between fairytale and a cruel tale. 

But supported by an unbridled imagination, 

by numerous variations 

on the theme of the landscape 

and those who live in it.

Benedikt Erlingsson confirms again 

that he is a precious talent 

for those who love to occasionally indulge in some clever grin, 

triggered by a scratchy satire,

seasoned with the right amount of malice.

Giulia Ghica Dobre- @24^th Sarajevo Film Festival
Sarajevo August 16th, 2018

Sauvage toi-meme

Our FIPRESCI Jury AWARD at the 35th Jerusalem International Film Festival:

"Sauvage" by Camille Vidal -Naquet

"Slauvage" is a killer bomb.

"Sauvage" speaks without mercy about our solitude and our need of love.

And about the limits of love unlimited.

And about what we are ready to accept for love.

While his hero passes from pass to pass, binds himself and loosens himself.

And Vidal-Naquet cares less about answers than about questions.

He does not know why and prefers the how.

Léo's path, which is supported by the montage and by the sharp image, invites the spectator to trace his own furrow,

to become the companion of this man

capable of ingesting everything that passes, and to digest all that breaks.

Leo is the prostitute at the center of Sauvage, the face of a young Romain Duris, more languid and disarmed, staggerish eyes.

A body offered to the public like that of a saint and martyr,

the vulnerability of a loser by vocation that immediately brings on its side the public, and not just the female and gay.

Because this is a story yes with an lgbt thematic, but with a destination (hopefully) universal.

Prostitutes then, those of Sauvage. On the sidewalk.

And yet more than parts of Pasolini, here we are reminded of the first and beautiful films of Gus Van Sant, Mala Noche and especially My Private Idaho, with his boys lost in drugs, with that solitude, with that pleasure of self-destruction.

And there is also like a brotherhood with the homeless and outlawish Mona Bergeronf

of "Sans toit ni loi" by Agnés Varda in its time the Golden Lion in Venice, with which Léo has a lot in common,...

...starting from an irresistible anarchic and savage vein,

from the drive to a stray life outside of any rule other than his own freedom.

Appropriate references and precedents.

And yet Camille Vidal-Naquet approaches more the unadomed neo-neo-realism of the Dardenne brothers, whose lesson seems unavoidable for anyone who cures a portrait of the humiliated and the offended.

But beyond the bare, merely factual and narrative approach, beyond its cinéma vérité ways, Sauvage has the tension and passion of melodrama.

Leo is a straight descendant of la Dame aux Camélias, a salesman who sells himself to the the highest bidder, and often not even the best, but who keeps his integrity and remains in search of that thing called love.

He is ingenuously in love with another prostitute who refuses him, and even undermined, just like Violetta and Marguerite, by tuberculosis.

He is a boy who chooses to get hurt,

a spotless angel with a dark self-punishment drive from and to hell.

But a boy who retains his innocence.

An innocence that shines more as it is smeared.

We do not know a thing about Léo's past.

Since the God Vidal-Naquet depsychologizes his characters from every easy cliché that might explain the fall: the family, the marginalization, etc.

Leo's suffering is shown concretely in a sort of a secular Way of the Cross between sin and impossible redemption.

A purely descriptive and evident approach which, however, does not prevent the viewer from being on the side of Léo,

nor the director to be visibly his accomplice.

Léo sells himself on the street, near the Strasbourg airport. He does it for money, driven by poverty, but also by the obscure need of having someone to love.

In fact, he will fall in love with a hustler like him, a tough macho, Gay only for money, but proudly heterosexual and who, although fond of Léo, can not accept to be loved by him.

Pure mélo.

They will only kiss when a customer imposes it as a conditio sine qua non,

and that will not be enough to get Ahd out of his machista cage.

Meanwhile, a prostitute from Romania tries to harness the stray Léo in a lovestory,

without succeeding.

Customers are parading before our eyes (and we think of the distant and archetipical "Belle de jour" by Luis Buñuel): the disabled, the widower who, only at a very advanced age, has allowed himself sex with boys (and Léo will be bound in a special and sincere way to him), a psychopath torturer of prostitutes called the Doctor, a couple of socially successful gays that treat poor Léo as a thing, as a commodity of which, once paid the price, you can arrange as you want.

And it is pure horror the scene in which the two monsters try to sodomize Léo with something more and worse than a dildo.

Because this is also a rather explicit sex film (and yet Vidal-Naquet saves us the torture inflicted by the sadistic Doctor).

But we do see Leo, at the instigation of his Eastern European friend, who pours into his penis, or rather into the urethra, a few drops of a powerful sleeping pill, so when a client practices a blow job he falls asleep, leaving the two free to rob the house.

But beyond its explicit scenes, Sauvage remains a magnificent, painful portrait of a lost boy whom one can not but love.

A stray attracted to absolute freedom

and morally complete and innocent

even in debauchery.

The director Camille Vidal-Naquet shows a reality that has grown out of the abyss

and looks for a sign of life in the oppression.

Léo is Sauvage.

But Sauvage is also this movie written so sincerely by Vidal-Naquet,

a piece of cinema genuinely wild and without limits,.

An elliptical Cinema that exceeds the look, recalling what is not there to be screened.

Giulia Ghica Dobre

Crete