Janus Contemporaries: Godland

[Ribs]

Janus has acquired Hlynur Pálmason's Godland

[DarkImbecile]

Godland (Hlynur Palmason, 2022) – A visually arresting, off-kilter period epic with a small debt to Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (which was edited by Natalia Lopez, if we’re going to make a daisy chain out of this) in its use of round-edged Academy ratio. The square format is better suited to Iceland’s vertical landscapes than traditional widescreen. Palmason’s previous feature, the thriller A White, White Day, was perfectly fine, but it didn’t give any hint of the ambition and visual sophistication of this work, which slots handily into the new tradition of historical poetic austerity jumpstarted by Portrait of a Lady on Fire, though the quest narrative of this film is closer to Piccolo Corpo (or indeed, Jauja). A large part of the film’s power is that its historic, epic trappings ultimately boil down to a rather bathetic tale of small-mindedness. Bonus points for featuring a terrific dog in a key role.

I can sign on to much of zedz' eloquent praise here; while the formal similarities to Jauaja are certainly there, this film is both more involving and less ambiguous while still maintaining some of the same patience and poetry as the Alonso film.

With Godland, Hlynur Pálmason creates a bifurcated narrative built around both a gorgeously expansive journey across a startlingly pristine and sharp-edged Iceland and the claustrophobically petty disputes and humiliations of the man at the center of that journey — Elliott Crosset Hove's Lucas, a Danish priest sent by the state church to bring God, Danish cultural standards, and wet-plate photography to the 19th-century Danish colony. Lucas' arrogance and disinterest in the people of the country is reflected in the way the harsh, unyielding landscapes of ice and rock punish him over the course of the first half of the film, which features the best of Maria von Hausswolff's truly stunning cinematography, including a breathtaking tilt shot that travels the length of a misty plunging waterfall from source to bouldered floor.

This opening journey across Iceland also sets the stage for an increasingly petulant dispute between Lucas and Ingvar Sigurdsson's Ragnar, the guide whose irritation at Lucas' stubborn ignorance is matched by the intensity of the priest's disdain for this uneducated Icelander. Their inability and/or unwillingness to communicate or show basic respect for each other simmers throughout the film, and the two men's fates are similarly absurd. I'm sure I'm missing a lot of historical and cultural context that would add further depth to Lucas' failures as a priest and a colonizer, but the basic dynamics are certainly apparent enough to appreciate, or at least not allow any confusion to get in the way of the beauty of Godland's images.

I've not seen Pálmason's other work, but if this represents as big a step forward artistically as zedz describes, I'm excited to see where he goes from here; I may have been even more positive on it had it not come so late in the festival and late on the day I watched it, when it was harder in the moment to fully appreciate its deliberate pace and quieter moments without being diligent not to drift off.

[DarkImbecile]

Trailer

[swo17]

Nov 21

[FrauBlucher]

DVDBeaver