THE SEA (Hafid)
# stars based on 4 stars: 2.5 Reviewed by: Harvey Karten Palm Pictures Directed by: Baltasar Kormakur Written by: Baltasar Kormakur from Olafur Haukur Simonarson's play Cast: Gunnar Eyjolfsson, Hilmir Snaer Guanason, Helene de Fougerolles, Sven Nordin, Kristbjorg Kjeld, Nina Dogg Filippusdottir, Herdis Porvaldsdottir, Sigurour Skulason, Elva Osk Olafsdottir Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 2/27/03
If there's one thing Icelanders need not worry about it's terrorism. Nobody in the Middle East has heard of the place. Iceland used to be the country that college students looking for cheap transportation to the Continent would fly to on the most economical airline short of Freddy Laker's bargain-basement company. They'd hang around the airport, then continue on Icelandair to Luxembourg. But there really are people living there, 350,000 in fact, and since they are not about to build bomb shelter or buy gas masks they settle for the real problems that the rest of us have; namely getting along with one another (especially with those in your own family). Baltasar Kormakur, fresh from a critical success with a sexy comedy, "101 Reykjavik," uses an epic structure to hone in on a family with the proverbial closet skeletons, scheming vipers, and people who seem so parochial from living in a small fishing village (actually filmed on Iceland's east cost town of Naskaupstadur) that they're going absolutely stir crazy. As the family patriarch pens his memoirs, he calls his three sons together to his spacious house to make pronouncements about the future.
While "The Sea" ("Hagid" in Icelandic) most resembles Shakespeare's "King Lear" conniving children out to tear apart daddy's little empire to New Yorkers like me the skeletons-- particularly an adultery that shatters some of its members in much the way that Biff is taken aback when spying on Willy Loman's tawdry one night stand in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" are simply too trivial to take seriously. While director Kormakur, who has co-written the film inspired by fellow-scripter Olafur Haukur Simonarson's play, introduces comedy at several points to deflate the family pretensions, the family whining simply gets on the nerves while the economic issues, particularly the fishing quota system which seems a part of Icelandic government policy since 1984, is skimmed over too quickly, leaving the audience wondering whether the nearest parallel in the U.S. is New York taxi medallions.
The cast of characters is a large one, and Jean-Louis Vialard's lens shifts from one neurotic to another rapidly as each holds forth with resentments, frustrations and longings so dreary that Kofi Annan would have difficulty (as usual) bringing some semblance of peace and order to the group.
The central character, Thordur (Gunnar Eyjolfsson), is the King Lear of the bunch, the head of household, in Chekhovian terms the estate owner in "Uncle Vanya, Professor Serbreyakov. Unlike Serbreyekov, however, who wants only to dump his Russian estate and move to the big city, Thordur resists all efforts by his grown children to sell off his fishing company and move to a retirement home in the country's capital. Thordur's trouble is that he has not modernized. Employing scores of people both local processors and Asian immigrants, he feels obligated to the people he employs, his community, and resents the efforts of globalization's big capitalist fish to gobble up his little fish. One son, Haraldur (Sigurour Skulason), manages the business and is pushed by his wife to assert himself against the current structure of the business. Thordur's youngest son, Aslaug (Elva Osk Olafsdottir) has been sponging off the old man in Paris, pretending to need funds to study business when in fact he is a songwriter. Though Aslaug has a pregnant, French girlfriend, Francois (Helene De Fougerolles), his half-sister has been moping for years, heartbroken that Aslaug has left the sinking family ship to live in gay Paree.
The more the skeletons come out, the more one is tempted to wonder whether anything important is really at stake. Forged mortgage papers, an adulterous relationship between one character and his wife's sister, a rival businessman who had a quick relationship with Thodur's wife 50 years ago and remains the old man's enemy to this day, and so it goes. Globalization is touched upon: the teen son of one perpetually drunk woman rejects the herring and kerosene beverage of the village, insisting on going for burgers and fries at a McDonald's clone (a greasy spoon that supplies most of the humor of the movie), and other children order pizza and Coke while they watch MTV. With nonsense like this, we don't wonder that Thordur's wife, Kristin (Kristbjorg Kjeld), ultimately burns the old man's memoirs.
Not Rated. 109 minutes. Copyright 2003 by Harvey Karten at Harveycritic@cs.com
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