BEFORE: Three films down, that means that Movie Year 12 is already 1% over - gee, it goes so fast! And my genre-hopping continues with this German/Danish mystery thriller - I remember that this film had some buzz when it was released back in 1997, but I never had the time to check it out. Fast-forward 23 years, and I've got the time, and it passes the litmus test - namely that I'm still curious about it, after all this time. So I'll give it a go if it helps me make my connections.
I think I figured we'd have snow on the ground by now, but hey, if climate change means I don't have to shovel quite as much in January, I'm hard-pressed to see the down-side. (KIDDING!).
Jim Broadbent carries over from "The Young Victoria", he should be good for a few films.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Snowman" (Movie #3,121)
THE PLOT: An Inuit boy runs off a snowy roof in Copenhagen and dies. Smilla, a half-Inuit who lives in the building and knows the boy, looks into it, and the clues take her to Greenland.
AFTER: I'd like to get to some Bergman films this year, as I made a pledge to do so after watching "Trespassing Bergman". I've got four films saved on my DVR, and I can easily add a fifth, but though they all link to each other, I haven't yet worked out how to connect with them. I'll have to see if there are any Hollywood films left with Max von Sydow that I haven't seen. I thought maybe this film might help, but the cast here is largely British, French, Irish and German, and very few Swedes, so that doesn't help at all. Really, you couldn't throw in a cameo from Erland Josephson or Gunnel Lindblom? Not even Pernilla August? I think I can probably link OUT of the Bergman films via Lena Olin or Peter Stormare, but getting in could be tricky. I guess there's always "Snow Falling on Cedars".
But I digress. Today my focus is on Denmark, and Greenland, and the Swedish films will have to wait. I didn't know there were so many Inuits living in Denmark, but I guess it makes sense, if they control the Greenland territory. By the same token, there are a lot of Hindu people living in the U.K., right? That's colonialism for you.
Perfect timing - this film is set just after the holidays, the characters often wish each other "Happy New Year", so it must be set in the early days of January, right? Coincidence for the win.
The lead character here isn't a detective, she's an expert on ice. Seems weird to us, but Denmark's got a lot of it, I guess, so somehow this is a thing? Water freezes, it forms ice, I would think that the study of ice probably stops right there, but what do I know? What did she write her thesis on, whether hot water or cold water freezes faster? How to make those really clear ice cubes, or the spherical ones to put in your cocktails? Can you get a degree in "ice" from Copenhagen University? At one point she tries to explain to her neighbor/love interest about how ice is connected to mathematics, and both are connected to relationships, and I don't think that made a lick of sense. Something about negative numbers representing loss, and fractions showing how complicated the world can be, but it seemed like a bunch of B.S. How can I take her seriously after that?
Anyway, the footprints of the dead boy in the snow on the roof lead her to believe that the boy was murdered, because no child runs in a straight line when they play, or something. More B.S. if you ask me. Where are the footprints of the murderer, then? Aha, I gotcha. But since she's an "ice expert" and not a detective, of course the police don't want to listen to her, and I can't say that I blame them. Just be glad she didn't try to explain math to you, guys.
But things don't add up at the morgue, either. The boy's body has strange needle marks, as if someone's been doing biopsies on him. And indeed, a very prominent Danish doctor has been examining him every month for a long time - and this kid is a nobody, how does this kid merit the attention of a top doctor and also the Greenland Mining Corporation? And how does the neighbor/love interest know so many experts who can provide information on the case and get Smilla on the next expedition to Greenland?
There is a way that the pieces all fit together here, that enigmatic opening scene turns out to be very important, but no spoilers here. Whether the pieces come together in a satisfying way, however, is a more difficult question to answer. The director, Bille August, has since admitted that this adaptation of a novel had problems from the script stage. Ya THINK? But if you ask me, there were serious critical errors made during filming, too - every time something significant happens, the camera can't WAIT to cut away, so it's very easy as a viewer to miss important stuff. Some main actions seem to happen off-camera, and that's a problem. Filmmaking 101 is to make sure you've got the main shot of the action, pause a bit, THEN go to the reaction shot. That's a basic, basic rule.
Another basic rule is to take the lead character's specialty (again, here's it's being an "ice expert") and make that relevant in the end. Like, I don't know, if the main villain is chasing her across the ice, then maybe she'd know where to step, on the more reinforced places on the frozen lake, and he wouldn't, so the ice would crack under him. That could have been a way to go, but the film just felt like it couldn't be bothered to bring that back and make the foreshadowing, you know, pay off.
But it turns out I may have been saying a Biblical name incorrectly all my life - the child in the film (seen mostly in excessive flashbacks) is named Isaiah - and I've always heard people say that like "eye-SAY-yah". But in this film, everyone says, "ee-SY-yah", and phonetically somehow I think that makes more sense. But is this just a European or a Danish preference?
Whatever happened to Trump's plan to buy Greenland, anyway? One of those weird news stories from last year that got supplanted by all the impeachment and election news. Was that just some form of distraction on the President's part, an attempt to dominate the news cycle? And what was the plan, anyway, to develop real estate there after the ice all melts, or maybe use the new land as a place to dump America's trash? Either way, WTF? I remember learning, though, that there's not much solid land under Greenland's ice, that's it's just a few tiny islands, so if the majority of the ice melts, it's going to be a sea someday, and not a country you can live in. So buying it now (which Denmark never would have agreed to, so I'm not sure why we were even talking about it in the first place) would have been a colossal mistake, but yet somehow, not the worst or even stupidest thing that Trump has proposed during his term.
Also starring Julia Ormond (last seen in "The Music Never Stopped"), Gabriel Byrne (last seen in "The 33"), Richard Harris (last seen in "Camelot"), Vanessa Redgrave (ditto), Tom Wilkinson (last seen in "Jenny's Wedding"), Robert Loggia (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), Emma Croft, Bob Peck, David Hayman (last seen in "Sid and Nancy"), Peter Capaldi (last heard in "Christopher Robin"), Mario Adorf (last seen in "Ten Little Indians"), Erik Holmey (last seen in "Conan the Destroyer"), Matthew Marsh (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Jurgen Vogel, Charlotte Bradley, Peter Gantzler, Lars Brygmann, Agga Olsen, Ann Queensberry, Clipper Miano, Ida Julie Andersen, Maliinannguaq Markussen-Molgard.
RATING: 4 out of 10 x-rays
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