Cannes review: “Godland” by Hlynur Palmason

Bishop Lucas warns him of the danger before he begins serving the distant community of Icelanders in Cannes. earth god. “It’s easy to go crazy there,” he explains at his dining table in Copenhagen, constantly chewing on the fabulous holidays that await us. Iceland, where the sun never sets on summer nights, where the climate is extreme, the landscape is monumental: just remember the apostles, “a group of lonely men”, advises the bishop wiping his mouth. Lucas (Elliot Crosset Howe) doesn’t eat; At first glance he tells you that he is a priest with ascetic tendencies.

He feels clearly isolated as he walks through the sphagnum moss with his guides and helpers. They have a tight schedule, with a fixed deadline until the end of the summer to build their church and join their flock in a weekly piety show. Your guide is Ragnor, a cheeky Icelandic played by Granite Hard, played by Ingvar Sigurdsson, as Howe, a regular employee of director Hlin Palmason, who can read rivers, fight on horseback and endure all poverty without complaining.

Ragnor only speaks Icelandic; Lucas speaks only Danish and, although a translator speaks to him, he seems unable to remove a single local word. It is a barrier that thickens and becomes an impassable wall. You don’t need to exchange thoughts to know that you embody two ways of being fundamentally opposite. The clumsy photographic artifice with which Lucas insists on moving mountains, sometimes staring at his surroundings to take a photo for posterity, can read the metaphor of the bundle of nonsense he brings to this desert. The journey itself is the whim of a city man; In Iceland, everything is provided by boat. Lucas only has the idea of ​​an epic trip across the country. He says he knows people, but he doesn’t know anyone. Perhaps this is the first sign of his madness.

That the desert itself is at the center of this story is not surprising. What’s always surprising, at least to those who haven’t seen Palmason’s two previous feature films, is how he translates the dark magnificence of this landscape into his own aesthetic goals, creating two-dimensional models from a grid of streams and colorful moss and field canvases. Rocky wall. Iceland offers endless panoramas; Palmason resists the temptation to use a good academic report so that the film’s image is almost square. When the camera is on a character, we don’t see a person in the landscape, from the side, and not even a dwarf with the brilliance of him. We see the whole person. Sometimes we see a monster.

Lucas nearly dies on the journey. No loss, one would think, Ragnor would surely think, compared to other men and horses lost along the way, above all thanks to Lucas’ vain refusal to comply with the demands of the time. Survivors carry him, even if they take him to town, where they will serve him on a stretcher. Your ticket is for a wealthy farmer’s house. The farmhouse living room, with its lace curtains and sparkling dining table, looks incredibly clean and beautiful.

So are his two daughters. Palmason’s lovely daughter, Ida, shows off some equestrian tricks in the film, which is half inhabited by horses and dogs. Her eldest son and Anna (Vick Carmen Sonny) are of marriageable age. As his health improves, Lucas clearly feels Anna’s vitality and feelings that are not entirely pure. Meanwhile, Ragnor uses his energy to help build the church, driving nails into the woods in the summer sunlight in scenes reminiscent of Peter Weir’s testimony. He hasn’t forgotten how much you hate this excited priest.

earth god It moves slowly, sometimes painfully. It should convey the feeling of traveling not as an acute series of threatening encounters, but as something long and exhausting. Time is truly the essence of the film. Palmason is fascinated by the weather in general, but above all by the changing of the seasons. We see the church scaffolding surrounded by its tree trunks as the first snow falls. We see the passage of time recorded in The Death of a Dead Horse and its Progressive Decay, a series that the director has been shooting for two years. We feel the waste of time in Lucas’ thin body and fragile mind.

Palmason is a visionary who pursues his vision with such disciplined diligence that he has to return to take more photos of a dead horse. The audience isn’t necessarily that organized; It is possible to get lost in thoughts of what to eat for dinner. But then the light changes, Sigurdsson blinks and you’re back on the road, circling the edge of a mountain and heading towards the end, which has the power of tragedy. Without a doubt, Palmason will continue to work towards making a film that establishes that incomprehensible balance of time and time. Now it is very close.