Northern European Films – Under Southern Eyes

Tunnelen: an underdeveloped film of future dystopia as experienced by a generic family

André Øvredal, “Tunnelen” (2016)

Even something as seemingly innocuous and commonplace as driving to the seaside – and then getting stuck in peak-hour traffic on the way back home – becomes fodder for dystopian science fiction horror in Norwegian director André Øvredal’s short film “Tunnelen”. A family of four (Tom the father, Jeanette the mother, and Peter and Anne the children) is returning home in its self-driving car (which looks exactly like all the other self-driving cars on the multi-lane highway) and must go through a huge tunnel to get back into the city and home. Home is one of millions of rabbit-hutch apartments in a huge brutalist steel hive amongst all the hundreds of other steel hives bunched up together in the city. The tunnel is subject to periodic closures, none of which can be predicted (and thus planned for) in advance. While the slowly crawling traffic inches through the tunnel, our family sweats out the agonising time while the car moves silently along with other cars. Peter befriends a girl, Eva, in the car alongside theirs. Halfway through the tunnel, the lanes change around the family and Peter loses sight of Eva’s car. When the four are almost out of the tunnel, the traffic stops and huge metal shutters roll down, stopping just behind them so they lose sight of the car behind them. The family is then allowed to travel on to its home destination while the car that was behind it is stuck in the tunnel – arbitrarily chosen as part of a periodic population reduction.

The tension is very palpable in family members’ faces and in the increasingly agitated conversations they have. Jeanette desperately tries to keep Anne occupied with her artwork. The family – and all other families like it – sit helplessly in the huge phalanxes of black self-driving cars as they move slowly through the tunnel. The steel grey hues and black backgrounds of the film suggest a grimy, dismal existence for most people though our family and Peter’s new friend Eva look like stereotypically well-scrubbed Scandinavians.

While the actors put in good performances in roles limited by the demands and restrictions of the plot, ultimately the film looks sketchy and underdeveloped. We never really learn why the family must travel to the seaside resort and back again using a tunnel everyone knows is liable at any give moment to shut down and execute every single person trapped inside. Viewers must make their own judgement as to the type of government and political system existing in the world of “Tunnelen” that would willingly sacrifice citizens for a particular environmental ideology. We learn very little about the main characters themselves, what they have done and might continue to do that will put their lives and their children’s lives in jeopardy when they have to travel through the tunnel or cross over some other vital transport artery. “Tunnelen” could have done with a slightly longer treatment emphasising important issues of the day and exploring the consequences of people willingly giving up control over their lives and possessions to the authorities.

The film is based on a short story “The Tunnel Ahead” by Alice Glaser that was first published in 1961 and which explores the nature of human acquiescence to repressive totalitarian governments such as those of Germany and Italy under Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini from the 1930s to the present day. Perhaps if the film had taken on the themes and characters of that short story, it would have had more to say about the nature of the society in which Tom and his family live, how the family acquiesces in its repression and how its members, especially its children, suffer from that repression.

The Swedish Model: a shallow and unedifying view of Sweden’s no-lockdown COVID-19 strategy

“The Swedish Model” (Foreign Correspondent, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 30 June 2020)

In March 2020, when the SARS-CoV-2 virus had been circulating in Europe for at least two months already, most countries there adopted lock-down of varying degrees of severity – with some countries such as Spain adopting such an extreme version that even young children were not allowed outside the places where they lived – yet Sweden opted to follow an approach in which such measures as social distancing and appropriate hand hygiene would be recommended rather than ordered on pain of punishment or penalties. Restaurants, pubs and cafes would still remain open, provided social distancing was practised; schools would remain open; and people would be more or less free to continue with normal activities. The Swedish government’s aim was to limit the spread of the coronavirus infection in the country without overburdening the Swedish healthcare system. Since adopting the no-lockdown policy, Sweden’s infection rate and mortality rate compared with several other European countries have been high, and the general global consensus is that these high rates of infection and death are the result of the no-lockdown policy.

Researched by Lisa Millar, who also provides voice-over narration in parts, this episode of “Foreign Correspondent” takes a similar view, that Sweden’s relaxed no-lockdown policy is in part responsible for the high toll the disease has taken among the more vulnerable groups in society, in particular the elderly in aged care facilities and refugees and immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. A large part of the film involves following different stories of individuals: a director of an aged care home with 350 patients; a Syrian Christian activist; a university professor opposed to the no-lockdown policy who sets up a testing centre in an immigrant neighbourhood in Stockholm; and finally Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, who breezily tells his interviewers that Sweden is doing the right thing in striving to achieve herd immunity as he goes about giving speeches and reassuring people that the country is on the right track. He admits that Sweden has neglected its elderly and immigrant groups but takes no personal or other responsibility for the Swedish government’s oversight as he continues on his merry way.

In covering personal stories, the film provides no analysis of why the elderly and the immigrant community bear the brunt of the pandemic that has hit the country hard. Millar tells us that the vast majority of SARS-CoV-2 deaths are of people aged 70+ years, and with most of these people also in aged care institutions, they are unlikely to benefit from lockdown conditions. Indeed, in many countries that do have lockdown, the numbers of people in aged care places suffering and dying from COVID-19 are out of proportion compared to younger age groups and in some countries the median age of death from COVID-19 is in the late 40s. Had Millar stepped back from emphasising personal stories (which, while tragic in their own ways, do not tell viewers much about the nature of the disease as it affects Swedish society), and investigated the character of aged care institutions in Sweden, compared to their equivalents in, say, Denmark or Norway, she might have found something very disturbing: Sweden’s aged care institutions are the responsibility of municipal and regional governments, which have outsourced their management to private companies. Privatisation has led to these facilities housing several hundred patients, cared for by workers on contracts on low pay and working in sometimes quite appalling conditions. To scrape together an income they can survive on, many workers work at more than one facility.

The low income and lousy working conditions in aged care homes mean that such work attracts people who can find little other work in Sweden: these people turn out to be the very refugees and immigrants who themselves have been hit hard by the disease. On top of this, these groups often live in areas designated no-go zones by police, due to gang warfare and high rates of crime, and this means that government offices providing social services (and information about COVID-19 and how to avoid it or minimise its spread) in the languages of the refugee and immigrant communities are scarce in their localities. Refugees and immigrants frequently live in very crowded and unhealthy housing, with three generations in the one residence, and aged care workers coming home from working shifts at one or more places might spread the disease and infect their older relatives even if they themselves are asymptomatic.

In general, Sweden’s poor experience in dealing with COVID-19, and in failing to protect its most vulnerable citizens, is a consequence of decades of governments privatising what should be publicly funded and resourced institutions, subject to public accountability, and ignoring the needs of marginal groups in society and the discrimination and barriers that impede their socio-economic advancement. That “Foreign Correspondent” completely missed analysing the broader context which might have enabled it to find the link between the high infection and mortality rates between two groups of vulnerable people (the aged, and the refugees / immigrants from poor countries) but preferred to wring out weepy and emotional stories to attract viewer attention reflects very poorly on the program and on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Australian viewers expect a higher and deeper standard of coverage of national and global issues at the ABC and to see this institution adopting practices associated with trashy commercial television programs purporting to feature political or current affairs issues and analysis is indeed grave and tragic.

The Last Knit: dealing with a personal inner hell of addiction and compulsion

Laura Neuvonen, “The Last Knit” (2005)

Technically this digital animated short is well done but the very simple plot of a woman addicted to knitting a long, long scarf that ends up pulling her over a cliff doesn’t really justify the effort put into the cartoon. The short’s theme on addiction and on how individuals risk their lives and health to satisfy that hunger or need that can never be satisfied become obvious early on. The problem though is that once the theme and the sole character are established, the plot seems at a loss as to what to do with the woman so it keeps digging around in its own groove, the woman knitting and knitting and knitting until the wool runs out so she has to use her hair … all while the scarf grows longer and longer, runs over the cliff’s edge and threatens to pull her into a literal as well as existential void. Come to think of it, all this repetition might be part of the theme of addiction as well … the film is just as addicted to keeping the woman on a one-track journey to her own hell.

Just when you think all is lost for the character, she manages to break her addiction to knitting, only to fall for another … Unfortunately the film does not supply any more information about how the woman came to be addicted to knitting in the first place and whether that addiction replaced still another compulsion. Viewers aren’t likely to feel much connection with or sympathy for the character. The cliff-side setting is attractive and important for the plot but again we learn nothing about why the woman must be there in the first place. The whole scene looks set up for a suicide and perhaps as the short comes to a close and the woman shows signs of developing another uncontrollable obsession, the prospect of suicide as a release from a personal inner hell becomes a possibility.

At the time of its release, the film was popular in film festivals around the world but its theme and the implications of that theme, along with the shortcomings of the plot and the character design, seem to have made sure that the film would be forgotten.

Aniara: a disappointing critique of human society in a spaceship on a doomed voyage

Pella Kagerman, Hugo Lilja, “Aniara” (2018)

An ambitious project to bring a poem by the Swedish poet / author / former sailor Harry Martinson (who co-won the Nobel Literature Prize in 1974) to the big screen, “Aniara” tells the tale of a spaceship transporting colonists from a future Earth ravaged by the effects of climate change and environmental destruction to Mars where new homes billed as a Promised Land are waiting for them. Just as you’d expect though, a bit of space junk from some long-forgotten satellite or previous space journey hits the ship and sends it off-course into the deeper recesses of space. To make matters worse, the crew has had to eject the ship’s nuclear-powered fuel reserves to avoid an even worse catastrophe. From then on, Aniara sails farther and farther towards the outermost limits of the cosmos in a vain attempt to find a planet whose gravitational pull can be used by the crew to manoeuvre the ship around and send it back to Earth or to Mars.

In the meantime, while the crew hope to find this planet, a ship employee known as Mimaroben (Emelie Jonsson), hereafter MR, has been tasked with looking after the passengers’ psychological health by operating a giant machine called Mima which can read people’s thoughts and draw on their memories and dreams to create virtual reality worlds in which their owners can participate. For a few weeks, Mima operates perfectly but after the accident, more and more people want to use Mima as a form of escape from the frustrations of waiting for help or rescue or good news from the Aniara crew, and Mima eventually breaks down completely from the overload of painful memories and nightmares. MR is blamed for Mima’s breakdown and is briefly imprisoned, along with one of the crew, navigator Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro), but both women are released a year or so later. By then, they have formed a couple and get to share accommodation.

As the weeks roll into months and the months roll into years, in spite of constant reassurances by Captain Chefone (Arvin Kananian) that all is well, people’s hopes turn into despair and the glittering consumerist society on Aniara – it is outfitted like a giant passenger cruise liner – breaks down. In various chapters that take place during the ship’s lifetime, people turn to religious cults for guidance and reason for living; some of these cults seem to be no more than excuses for sexual orgies. Isagel becomes pregnant in one such orgy and gives birth to a boy. While the child gives hope to both MR and Isagel, Isagel later becomes depressed at the thought that the child will live his entire life in an artificial environment; viewers can tell 10 parsecs away what tragedy will befall both Isagel and the baby.

MR spends her time teaching esoteric space mathematics to child and teenage passengers in the hope that some of them will learn enough to become part of the Aniara crew. In her spare time, she tries to cheer up Isagel and help bring up the baby, assist the crew where needed and rework part of Mima to create a beam screen of natural Earth landscapes around the ship for passengers to view.

By necessity, the narrative is broken up into chapters that provide snapshots of the gradual deterioration of human society on board the ship, as crew and passenger expectations of a quick, easy and luxurious trip turn into despair and despondency, leading to violence, the proliferation of religious cults, substance abuse and addiction, and suicide. At the same time, due to the episodic nature of the narrative, there is no indication in the film of people gradually overcoming their differences and forming associations to help one another across the class divide or the crew hierarchy, in spite of Captain Chefone’s increasingly despotic and irrational behaviour. Directors Kagerman and Lilja are clearly no believers in people’s ability to overcome lifetimes of imbibing capitalist and consumerist values and ideologies. Unfortunately the film does a poor job as a study of trauma, due in part to its structure: no reason is given as to why so many people form cults or try to kill themselves – it’s as if the directors have assumed such behaviours are inevitable and always follow in a closed environment of extreme need where there is no hope of rescue, so viewers are expected to go along with such plot stereotypes. The result is a very shallow movie.

Character development remains at a woeful level of superficiality and the romance between MR and Isagel doesn’t quite come off as genuine, but as a sop to identity politics. The conflict between MR and the increasingly capricious and incompetent captain seems equally shallow, and MR’s astronomer friend (Anneli Martini) who foresees the ship’s doom is wasted as a character. There should have been plenty of room in the narrative for panics arising from food shortages or a breakdown in some essential item (such as the water supply or the electricity) but strangely the film-makers opted to miss opportunities for testing character and people making decisions that could spell life or death for the whole population and which point to future directions for society on board to develop towards. Can people overcome despair and lack to find comfort in their own imaginations, resources and one another, and combine to create a new co-operative society with better leadership and better decision-making abilities? The film suggests not.

In all, while the cinematography, design and the special effects were very good, much of the science behind “Aniara” is quite dodgy – there is no explanation as to where water for washing sheets and clothes comes from, and in a future where ships routinely take people back and forth between Earth and Mars, surely a technology for cleaning things that does away with water would be more credible – and the sociology is riddled with cheap stereotyping. There is no attempt to explore and criticise capitalism and social hierarchy in the film even though capitalism provides the context in which the Aniara ship sails on its doomed voyage: people did have to pay to board the ship and enjoy its luxuries, and MR was expected as an employee to provide a service passengers had already paid for. The film is a great disappointment.

MH17 – Call for Justice: independent journalists’ investigation and findings create more questions than answers about the official investigation

Yana Yerlashova, “MH17 – Call for Justice” (Bonanza Media, July 2019)

Five years after the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 passenger jet was shot down in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board, the investigation led by the Netherlands, Ukraine, Australia and Belgium (and including Malaysia intermittently – the country was not included on the Joint Investigation Team for the first six months of the investigation) is no closer to coming to a definite conclusion, based on a definite chain of evidence, as to who actually bears the responsibility for shooting down the jet. Instead the JIT continues to adhere to a narrative, publicised almost as soon as the jet hit the ground, that supposedly Russian-backed separatists fighting the Ukrainian military brought the plane down with an SA-11 missile launched from a BUK missile delivery system. This documentary proceeds from the JIT’s public naming of four Donbass fighters as being responsible for ordering or leading the shoot-down, and global mass news media’s parroting of that announcement. The Bonanza Media team of investigative journalists, led by Yana Yerlashova and Max van der Werff, travel across the globe, from eastern Ukraine to Europe to Malaysia, to interview people including the current Malaysian Prime Minister Mohammed Mahathir, German aviation lawyer Elmar Giemulla, one of the accused Donbass fighters Sergey Dubinsky, members of the public in Kuala Lumpur, independent German journalist Billy Six, a friend of a passenger on the doomed jet, and local residents in the area where the plane went down, to get their views on the investigation and on what actually happened, and find that what actually happened on 17 July 2014 was very different from what the JIT claims and what the rest of the world believes.

While the documentary can be a bit confusing in the way it dashes from one aspect of the Bonanza Media team’s own investigation to another, and each aspect seems remotely related to the next, quite a few things become very clear. The team discovers that the Ukrainian security service SBU’s phone-taps of conversations Sergey Dubinsky had with his fighters were edited and tampered with after the journalists take tapes to IT forensic investigators in Malaysia for examination and analysis. One jaw-dropping fact is that five years after the incident, various parts of the jet can still be found in the countryside around where the plane fell. The journalists come across a large part of the wing in a field and watch it being transported to a Ukrainian woman who deposits it and various other pieces of wreckage into a large shed, promising to deliver the scraps to the Dutch. Villagers in Stepanovka, the area where MH17 tell of what they saw on the day: they say that military jets shadowed the passenger jet while a missile launched from a site held by Ukrainian forces (contrary to the official narrative) headed towards the jet. Along the way, videos that have been used by the JIT to support the official narrative are examined and found to have been spliced together in ways that belie the dates when they were originally made, to suggest that the Donbass fighters received support from Russia and fired the missile. Independent Dutch journalist Stefan Beck tells the Bonanza Media team that he interviewed a Ukrainian military air traffic controller who tells him that the Ukrainian government misinformed the JIT about three radar stations being switched off on the day of the crash (they had actually been switched on).

Many questions arise from this documentary: why was Ukraine allowed to join the JIT but not Malaysia? why did the JIT rely on Ukrainian SBU’s suspect phone-taps as evidence on which to indict Sergey Dubinsky and three other men? why did the JIT not do a thorough job in collecting all the evidence and why is the team uninterested in the evidence the Bonanza Media team and others have found? Why is eyewitness evidence being ignored? All these questions suggest that the investigation was prejudiced against Russia from the outset and remains prejudiced for geopolitical and strategic reasons.

Viewers may be surprised that the documentary is quite short, less than half an hour, and is rather rough around the edges, finishing very quickly and zipping through the end credits. Some aspects of the journalists’ own investigation are quite thorough in coverage and others not so much so. The documentary needs to be seen in conjunction with other online, printed and visual materials and information that query the JIT’s investigation and the conclusions it reaches, and the disgustingly shoddy way in which that team conducted its search and analysed the evidence collected.

Victim of the World Wildlife Fund: racial cleansing and genocide masquerading as nature conservation

Jos van Dongen, “Victim of the World Wildlife Fund” (Zembla, 2019)

Now this is the kind of hard-hitting investigative journalism I like to see! In this report for Zembla, a Dutch programme produced by BNNVARA (part of the Dutch public broadcasting system) that makes documentaries, journalist Jos van Dongen travels to Assam in eastern India to investigate allegations that the World Wildlife Fund aids and abets the destruction of villages and agricultural communities surrounding Kaziranga National Park (hereafter KNP) so that their lands can be incorporated into the park to help preserve declining populations of the Indian rhinoceros. Van Dongen discovers that park rangers in KNP have been issued with military assault weapons and are trained to shoot to kill. He also finds that villagers have been wrongly accused of poaching animals and in many cases have been detained, tortured and killed by park rangers. Finally and most shockingly, van Dongen discovers that the WWF has been funding family planning programmes in villages around the park, and that in these programmes medical and non-medical staff have been sterilising men and women.

Probably most viewers will be shocked to discover that the World Wildlife Fund has always had a hidden political agenda aimed at racial cleansing of unwanted and mostly poor and marginalised groups of people, disguised as a concern for conserving nature. With a history of having been founded or represented by people with direct or indirect connections to Nazi Germany or its institutions – people such as Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld (who married into the Dutch royal family) in the Netherlands and Prince Phillip of the British royal family – the WWF was set on a path of following policies and programmes that pit the communities that have always lived with endangered animals and ecosystems (and who know best how to conserve those ecosystems and the endangered flora and fauna within them) against those very ecosystems, and which portray humans and nature as always being in perennial conflict. This mind-set leads to the forced removal (and as the documentary shows, sometimes the torture and murder) of communities and individuals who innocently stray into the parks and are accused of being poachers, by park rangers.

Incredibly the park rangers themselves receive near-paramilitary training and military assault weapons, and are taught torture methods – by whom, the documentary does not say – that are funded by the WWF. While understandably park rangers need to be able to protect themselves from poachers who may be working for criminal gangs, the solutions they are provided with (including a “shoot to kill” policy) may be targeting local communities more than they are actually targeting the poachers, the gangs who employ them and the end consumers (usually the wealthy in other countries) who regard possessing rhino horns or jewellery and other trinkets made from ivory as status symbols. Also, by arming the park rangers with military assault weapons and training them, the WWF may be worsening the poaching problem, as in Kaziranga National Park and elsewhere around the world park rangers themselves have been involved in poaching activities.

Through interviews, notably with Professor Bram Buscher (Professor and Chair at the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University), the documentary makes very clear that the local communities next to national parks like Kaziranga National Park are the people who understand the ecosystems and the endangered species existing within them best; and that the issue is not overpopulation, to be solved by foisting family planning programmes onto these communities or secretly sterilising their members, but is instead the economic growth paradigm and the materialist / consumerist model that accompanies it. This ideology is used to justify land grabs made by governments and corporations working together. Viewers will probably not be surprised to learn that the WWF also works with corporations in promoting its ideology and agenda (in which the supposed rights of nature and animals always supersede human rights) and turning conservation, sustainability and nature into profit-making commodities.

This documentary certainly calls into question the current paradigm of setting aside land for national parks without consulting the communities who have long occupied the land and cared for it for centuries, before the arrival of Europeans, with their greed for land and its wealth, and the many ideological justifications they had for stealing that wealth. The paradigm of conservation championed by the WWF and its supporters – conserving nature for the benefit and enjoyment of a privileged elite – has long had a racist and genocidal underlay.

An Act of Defiance: a hard-hitting, confrontational film about personal courage and the fight for justice

Jean van de Welde, “An Act of Defiance” (2017)

Quite a hard-hitting and confrontational film this historical drama on the incidents and trial that sent political activist Nelson Mandela to prison for nearly 30 years turns out to be, with a focus on the barrister who defended Mandela and his co-defendants in the trial and how his own life was turned upside-down as a result. In 1963, Mandela and his inner circle of black African and Jewish activists in the African National Congress are arrested at Lillesleaf Farm in Rivonia, in Johannesburg, on charges of conspiring to commit sabotage. Lawyer Bram Fischer (Peter Paul Muller) reluctantly agrees to defend Mandela and the other activists at their trial in spite of his own connections with the African National Congress through the outlawed South African Communist Party; indeed, some of the documents seized by police at Lillesleaf Farm are actually in his own handwriting. Mandela urges his co-defendants to plead not guilty to the charges of high treason, punishable by the death penalty, and appeals to them and their legal counsel to put the South African government on trial during their trial over the system of apartheid blanketing the country’s institutions that denies non-white people the same rights, privileges and freedoms as white people have.

As the trial progresses, Bram Fischer’s sympathies with the defendants are called into question, especially when the legal counsel for the prosecution reveals his link to Mandela’s inner circle, and Fischer and his family are subjected to harassment by the police. While his wife Molly and their children support Fischer and his desire to see justice done – incidentally only two of Fischer’s three children are portrayed in the film – the Rivonia trial has a huge impact on all their lives, even after cross-examination ends, the judge delivers the verdict and the sentence, and Mandela and his fellow co-defendants are forced to return to prison; over the next few years, strange incidents suggestive of continuing government and police harassment occur in the family’s lives which result in tragedy and Fischer’s own arrest, trial, sentencing and imprisonment.

The tone of the film is very sober yet matter-of-fact. Initially it is slow and little of note happens until the trial begins. Then the pace and the tension are relentless as the trial grinds away, wearing down Fischer and his legal team. Relief at the verdict when it comes, is but very short-lived as the film details the consequences of Fischer’s involvement in the Rivonia Trial on him, Molly and other members of his family. The acting is good and consistent if fairly minimal.

While highlighting the role that members of the South African Jewish community played in fighting apartheid alongside Mandela and other black Africans, the film does little to show the support non-white people might have demonstrated for Fischer and the hostility he and his family might have faced from their own Afrikaner community. Divisions among the whites in their attitudes toward the Rivonia Trial and its participants could also have been shown. Ironically, for all the emphasis the film places on how South African Jewish individuals worked with black people to fight apartheid, most black characters in the film are basically passive bystanders. Without the overall political context that was South Africa in the early 1960s, viewers outside the country who have little knowledge of its history before the 1990s will not be able to appreciate the depth of hatred and enmity against Bram Fischer for defending Mandela and the activists from the government and its institutions, the huge risks he took in doing so and the sacrifices he was forced to make later. The film highlights how the search for justice and the advancement of society demand considerable personal courage from individuals who, all too often, end up being persecuted and suffer great personal tragedy.

The Wife: a solid film notable for its lead performances but little else

Bjorn Runge, “The Wife” (2017)

As films go, “The Wife” is enjoyable mainly for Glenn Close’s understated performance as the title character: for the most part, the plot is predictable and Runge’s direction is solid if lacking in flair. It’s best seen as a character study of a woman who had aspirations to be a writer and who ends up repressing her ambitions to support her husband’s writing career. Literary giant Joseph Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature so he and his wife Joan (Close) prepare to journey to Stockholm to receive the award. Taking their son David (Max Irons), himself an aspiring writer, with them, the Castlemans are accosted on the plane by Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater), a creepy freelance writer who plans to pen a tell-all biography about Joseph. Finally in Stockholm, the couple and their son settle down in their hotel rooms, and from here on the Castleman marriage starts to shake as the significance of the prize, her husband’s reaction and his cantankerous behaviour towards Bone and Max, and the general fawning over Joseph (with herself being relegated to the background as the dutiful and supportive wife) gradually begin weigh heavily on Joan.

Two chance utterances between Joseph and Joan in front of David alert viewers to the possibility that perhaps Joseph’s writing over the decades hasn’t entirely been his own. While the Castlemans perform the round of parties and meet-and-greet rituals leading up to the prize-giving ceremonies, Bone gathers enough information (including talking to Joan and Max separately) to come to the same conclusion. Flashbacks to when a young Joan (Annie Starke) first met Joseph (Harry Lloyd) as a student enrolled in his creative writing classes at college in the 1950s, leading to their becoming secret lovers while Joseph is still married to his first wife, and then to early life together struggling to make ends meet (Joseph having divorced his wife and left college to pursue writing full-time), fill in the details of that particular plot strand.

Close gives a master class in minimalist acting with her eyes and expressions that hint at the emotional turmoil and suffering within. Pryce is an excellent foil with his cantankerous and crude behaviour that includes chasing a woman photographer young enough to be his daughter. Slater plays Bone a little too smoothly; he seems comfortable as an oily, sleazy opportunist, and in the role offers little else. The rest of the cast is as wallpaper.

Apart from Close and Pryce’s acting, the film doesn’t offer much beyond demonstrating how a young female writer, shy and unsure of her talent, is deterred from following her dreams by an embittered female author (Elizabeth McGovern), her teacher / lover / husband’s own self-centred immaturity, lack of insight and arrogance, and the prevailing misogynist attitudes of the literary publishing industry in the 1950s. As time passes by, and her husband’s literary star begins its rise, Joan finds herself locked into supporting his career and becomes resigned to her role. The film only really perks up at the very end when Joan tells Bone what he can and can’t do, and one realises that, for all Joan supposedly suffered over the years as The Wife, her relationship with Joseph really was symbiotic and a purely stereotypical feminist explanation of their marriage as one where one party benefited at the expense of a long-suffering other and reaps all the rewards will not do.

The film could have offered some criticism, even light criticism, of the Nobel Prize and how this institution and the awarding of literary prizes can distort writers’ ambitions and affect their reputations. Too much weight can be attached to a writer’s reputation based on what prizes s/he has won without consideration for whether literary writing itself has become nothing more than a mere genre with its own load of stereotypes living in a bubble that is divorced from reality and with nothing valuable to say to most people struggling under political, economic and social systems that have become increasingly repressive, unequal, corrupt and inhuman.

Rams: a minimal but insubstantial film on the fragility of family and community ties and traditions against the outside world

Grimur Hakonarson, “Rams / Hrutar” (2015

Forty years ago, a family rift led to two brothers in an Icelandic sheep-farming family going their separate ways, splitting the family property in half so that each brother tends to his own flock of pedigreed heritage sheep. For forty years the two brothers Gummi (Sigurdur Sigurjonsson) and Kiddi (Theodor Juliusson) don’t speak to each other and Kiddi’s dog Somi takes handwritten messages from one to the other if they have to communicate. And forty years after the family conflict, now long forgotten, the two brothers do have to come together and communicate: in one of the brothers’ flocks, a ram comes down with a disease feared to be scrapie. The entire valley where the brothers live becomes a scrapie disaster zone and the government in Rejkjavik decrees that all sheep farmers in the area must slaughter their animals, clean and disinfect their properties and equipment, and remain sheep-free for two calendar years. Some sheep farmers are devastated by this news and decide to give up their farms; Gummi tries to comply with the regulations but can’t bring himself to kill his beloved ram; and Kiddi refuses point-blank to comply with the law. Faced with the extinction not only of their unique breed of sheep but also of their family legacy and way of life, the sensitive Gummi and stubborn, hard-drinking Kiddi need to come together if they’re to save Gummi’s prize ram and a small set of ewes from the veterinarians and the agricultural authorities.

The film starts as a quirky eccentric comedy centred around the brothers’ personality quirks and their feud, and gradually develops into a bleak tale in which the two are driven to desperate measures and risk their lives to maintain a family / cultural tradition. The isolation of these elderly sheep-farmers in a remote part of Iceland, and the self-reliant, taciturn nature such isolation engenders (even if its flip-side is eccentric and silent stubbornness) becomes apparent; even the government inspectors and the family lawyer from the south are puzzled by the brothers’ behaviour, and talk too much (and they’re Icelanders!) for the viewers’ comfort. Audiences become very aware of the attachment farmers like Gummi and Kiddi have for their animals and for the harsh physical environment where they have lived all their lives, and of the intrusive inspectors and veterinarians from Rejkjavik who look out of place in the windswept (and, in winter, snow-laden) open landscapes.

The plot is perhaps too simple and the characters of Gummi and Kiddi a little too stereotyped to carry the film’s themes of community and family ties, and how fragile these can be, successfully. The film spends more time with Gummi (whose daily routines are on the dull side) and not much at all on Kiddi so we know little about Kiddi other than that he drinks too much and is prone to anger and even violence. At times the film does drag with long silences – but that’s probably a problem for us city people with our short attention spans and dislike of long pauses in conversation – and the family conflict that split apart the brothers is never explained so viewers remain in the dark about how it came to have such a deep effect on the two men.

The film might have been more successful had the characters of the two men been more developed, and perhaps a sub-plot included as well. Something about how the outside world increasingly encroaches on the isolated sheep-farming community in a remote part of Iceland, and the changes it brings – changes that threaten a traditional way of life and the physical environment – would have added an extra layer of interest and conflict. The two brothers’ reaction to the threat that the authorities pose to their beloved ram and ewes may seem pathetic to some viewers and heroic (in a tragic sort of way) to others.

For a movie that is not long – it’s not quite 90 minutes – “Rams” does wear out its welcome quickly.

Tom of Finland: a film of hope, sympathy for underdogs and inspiration to others suffering hardship and oppression

Dome Karukoski, “Tom of Finland” (2017)

As a general introduction to the life of gay icon Tom of Finland, real name Touko Laaksonen, for a general viewing audience, this film is adequate enough. Spanning roughly four decades, it follows Laaksonen (Pekka Strang) from his youth when he was conscripted into the Finnish army to fight the Russian enemy in the late 1930s / early 1940s, to his eventual fame as an artist specialising in drawing hyper-sexualised erotic gay pornography. Early on, Laaksonen kills a Russian pilot and this incident haunts him on and off throughout the rest of his life. After being decorated for heroism during World War II, Laaksonen finds himself isolated and marginalised socially because of his homosexuality, in a period when homosexuality was illegal and couples engaging in furtive sexual activity in parks and public toilets at night were hunted down and beaten up by police. Frustrated, Laaksonen pours his troubles out into homoerotic drawings of hyper-masculine beefcake fellows in skin-tight leather biker outfits and lumberjack clothing. In the meantime, Laaksonen’s sister Kaija (Jessica Grabowsky) helps him get a job at her advertising agency employer and also invites a young male dancer Nipa (Lauri Tilkanen) to be their tenant to help pay the rent: Laaksonen realises he has met Nipa before and that Nipa is also gay.

Kaija had hoped Nipa would be the love of her life and for a while the two do act like a couple. Eventually though – the film does not make this too clear – Nipa and Touko become the couple and Kaija accepts and tolerates the relationship. The two men conduct their relationship clandestinely at secret underground clubs and a diplomat’s home until one evening when police raid the diplomat’s mansion and make arrests. The diplomat himself is exposed as gay, loses his job and is forced to undergo treatment to “cure” him of his homosexual tendencies.

After seeing Touko’s drawings, Nipa convinces him to send the drawings to a publisher in the United States. After publication, Touko’s work (under the Tom of Finland name) becomes popular with the gay community in California whose members use the sketches as part of their code to signal to other gay men who they are and if they are sexually available. In due time, Touko earns enough money from the drawings that he and Nipa can buy their own apartment, furnish it how they want (with yellow curtains that Touko calls “sissy”) and live fairly openly as a gay couple. Touko no longer needs to work at the advertising agency and can devote his time to drawing homoerotic pictures. He is brought to the US by two fans where he is introduced to the gay biker sub-culture which his pictures helped to inspire. By this time though, Nipa has been diagnosed with terminal throat cancer and his ailment is the precursor to the HIV – AIDS crisis that hits gay communities around the world hard. Touko is anguished that his drawings may have encouraged the promiscuity associated with the disease and with the help of his American friends resolves to help fight the disease and the politically conservative backlash against gay people.

As a film espousing hope and sympathy for the hardships that gay people have had to suffer, “Tom of Finland” probably has few equals. Unfortunately though the film gives little information about how society in Finland changes over the decades from one hostile and repressive towards homosexuality and homosexual people into one more tolerant and relaxed enough to make a film celebrating Laaksonen as a significant cultural icon. We do not learn when homosexuality was decriminalised in Finland (the year was 1971 when the law was changed) and when it was declassified as an illness (1981). The film’s narrow focus on Touko’s personal life and relationships to the exclusion of the changing social context around him robs it of a definite linear structure that would have given it more direction and made the film more relevant to a non-Finnish audience.

For a film with not much plot to work with, “Tom of Finland” is surprisingly absorbing, perhaps because its central characters are stoic yet sensitive, and need to be pushed by other people to get what is due to them. Touko needs Kaija to get him out of his post-war depression and needs Nipa to prod him to send his artwork to a publisher, setting in train the distribution of the drawings that will make his reputation. Kaija herself needs pushing but tragically rejects opinions that her own artwork is good and worthy of exhibiting. Seeing Kaija being left behind as an artist whose potential remains unrealised, and as a lonely spinster figure heavily dependent on mainstream approval and scornful of her brother’s “dick drawings”, I could not help but feel pity for her.

The film’s style for the most part is low-key and subtle: Touko’s liaisons are treated over-cautiously and even the scenes of gay life in California tend towards the tasteful side. The only exposed male genitalia are those of Touko’s drawings: even the fantasy figure Kake who sometimes appears in Touko’s dreams is always covered up. On the whole, the film is enjoyable to watch as a work of historical drama fiction portraying an individual and a subculture navigating their way through mainstream society’s limitations and testing its boundaries over the years.

The film provides no explanation as to why Touko was drawn to sketching and illustrating pictures of gay male beefcake types in working class fashions, or how and why motorcycles and the biker leather fashions that grew up around them after World War II should have become associated with gay subcultures.