Film review

Hvítur, Hvítur Dagur

Hlynur Pálmason (2019)

A White, White Day would have screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and is one of several offerings from the Festival line-up (Young Ahmed was another) that EIFF, in partnership with Curzon, has made available for streaming, for a few days only, on Curzon Home Cinema.  This unusual drama develops in ways to suggest the principal character – a recently widowed police chief in a small Icelandic town – is driven to distraction by grief and a need for revenge.  The film’s complex visuals are interpretable as expressions of a disturbed mind and the protagonist, Ingimundur (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson), resorts to alarmingly extreme action.  But it turns out he wasn’t imagining things.

Hlynur Pálmason’s second feature opens with the epigraph that explains its title.  According to this, ‘a white, white day’ is a day when ‘you can no longer tell the difference between the earth and the sky’ and the dead can talk to the living.  (The source of these words, the screen says, is unknown.)   We’re watching a car, from behind, moving along an otherwise empty road suffused in foggy whiteness.  After a while, the car crashes off the road to the left.  It’s a good few minutes later that the first human voice in A White, White Day is heard, and some way further into the story we infer that Ingimundur’s wife died in the opening car crash.  The crash is immediately followed by a montage which proceeds by jump cuts to show a house in a rural landscape that changes over the course of the montage.  Seasons pass; snow and horses come and go.  The appearance of the house changes too.  It’s not explicit how much time has elapsed between the car crash and the start of the narrative proper (though Rotten Tomatoes reckons two years).  It is made clear that Ingimundur, who’s in late middle age, is rebuilding the house as a home to share with his daughter and her family.

In working on the house, the taciturn, unsmiling Ingimundur perhaps has ‘to construct something/Upon which to rejoice’ but there’s no doubt that he does take pleasure in the company of his elder grandchild, eight-year-old Salka (Ída Mekkin Hlynsdóttir).  He can supervise the renovations and is available to provide regular childcare to Salka because he’s on what appears to be indefinite leave from police duties.  Traumatised by his wife’s death, Ingimundur is seeing a psychotherapist, Georg (Þór Hrafnsson Tulinius).  It’s not clear whether police authorities require this; I assumed so because it seemed unimaginable someone with Ingimundur’s personality would choose to undergo therapy.  Especially with Georg, who’s as voluble as his interlocutor is laconic.  In their first session in the film, Georg’s questions come thick and fast.  Three of the terse replies stand out.  Asked what he wants, Ingimundur says, ‘To build a house’.  Asked what he doesn’t want, he says, ‘To stop building it’.  Asked if he’s ever lonely, Ingimundur replies, ‘I’m never lonely around my granddaughter’.

Ingimundur’s quiet bereavement mutates through his discovery of a library book and photographs raising suspicions that his schoolteacher wife was having an affair with another man, Olgeir (Hilmir Snær Guðnason).  Ingimundur starts stalking him in an initially low-key way – turning up for a kickabout among middle-aged locals that Olgeir regularly attends.  The first time, Ingimundur gives him a couple of sideways looks.  The second time, he crashes into Olgeir, accidentally-on-purpose, on the field of play.  In the showers afterwards, Ingimundur’s friend Trausti (Björn Ingi Hilmarsson) humorously asks, ‘Have you got something against Olgeir?’  There’s no reply from Ingimundur or any evidence of Olgeir’s response to the collision.  By this stage of A White, White Day, this lack of reaction is unsurprising.

With one crucial exception, the narrative is propelled not through human interactions or dialogue but by the remarkable images created by the writer-director and his cinematographer, Maria von Hausswolff.  There are various screens within the screen, showing, inter alia, police surveillance footage of local roads, kids’ TV and a recurring surreal product of the main character’s mind:  the cumulative effect of these is to suggest a world both out of joint and imprisoning – and thus aligned with Ingimundur’s increasingly irrational perspective.  The visual highlight of the film occurs after Ingimundur, driving along the same stretch of road where the car crashed at the start and with Salka his passenger, comes to a sudden halt.  His vehicle has run into a rock fallen onto the road.  Ingimundur gets rid of the rock, pushing it off the edge of the road and Hlynur Pálmason shows its journey from there – down a steep hillside, onto and over a cliff edge, into the sea, down to a final soft landing on the sea bed.  A reading of this sequence of shots is bound to be subjective:  one possibility is that it represents the extent of Ingimundur’s separation from his wife, her utter inaccessibility.

A White, White Day is more impressive in developing a minatory, unstable atmosphere than in its more realistic aspects (despite Pálmason’s blurring, through the potency of the atmosphere, what’s real and what isn’t).  His eschewal of flashback makes it inevitable we don’t get much sense of Ingimundur’s relationship with his wife.  Even when this is the subject of conversation, he keeps his feelings under wraps.  Talking at home with Trausti, Ingimundur asks his friend if he has ever cheated on his wife of many years (Laufey Elíasdóttir).  When Trausti replies that he has a few times, and sees doing so as an occupational hazard, Ingimundur doesn’t appear shocked.  He just says of his own wife, ‘For some reason, she was always enough for me’.  Salka enters the room and plays an excerpt from one of Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen on a portable keyboard.  Trausti asks her questions about the composer and Salka chatters about Clara Schumann’s romance with Brahms – a bit of ‘ironic’ dialogue that feels incongruous in a visually-driven film like this.  Ingimundur looks uncomfortable but says nothing.

The crucial exception mentioned above is the interaction of Ingimundur and Salka.   Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson (whose hewn features recall Harry Andrews’) is an imposing figure and always commands attention but Ingimundur’s emotional reticence seems more fully realised in the company of his openly expressive grandchild.  (His daughter (Elma Stefania Agustsdottir) and her partner (Haraldur Stefansson), as well as the younger grandchild, are only minor characters in the story.)  Ída Mekkin Hlynsdóttir is Hlynur Pálmason’s daughter.  She may well be an extraordinary acting talent in the making but her father directs her superbly.  It’s Salka who supplies an unequivocal reality in the film; her distress at her grandfather’s behaviour registers like nothing else.  Salka asks Ingimundur to tell her a ‘scary’ bedtime story.  He certainly obliges, with a tale of grave-robbing and cannibalism that climaxes in his holding Salka’s head down under the duvet as if to suffocate her.  This is the film’s most disturbing and upsetting scene.  The strongest suggestion up to this point that Ingimundur is becoming deranged, it makes the viewer concerned for him, as well as for the frightened child.

For these reasons, the bedtime story eclipses the protracted, multi-stage explosion of Ingimundur’s violent torment.  When bad weather prevents Georg attending their therapy session, his volley of questions comes remotely, via a(nother) screen.  The connection is dodgy and Georg doesn’t receive the answers to his questions.  This Zoom-laden failure of communication triggers Ingimundur’s climactic loss of control.  He smashes the computer and much else in the room.  His former work colleagues, Bjössi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Hrafn (Arnmundur Ernst Björnsson), reprimand him for this (Georg has been in touch with them); Hrafn demands that Ingimundur hand over his keys to the police station.  (It seems that in smalltown rural Iceland, as in Ebbing, Missouri, discharged cops can still access the workplace as before.)   Ingimundur beats up both Bjössi and Hrafn, and locks them in the station cells.  He then goes to Olgeir’s home, drives him out to an isolated place and holds him at gunpoint, forcing Olgeir to confess that he did indeed sleep several times with Ingimundur’s wife.

It’s conceivable this isn’t true – that Olgeir, to save his own skin, tells Ingimundur what he thinks he wants to hear – but there’s nothing in either the manner of the confession or subsequently to suggest that.  The following morning, Ingimundur and Salka are driving along the usual stretch of road when Olgeir waves down the car:  it was his wife, he insists to Ingimundur, who contacted the police about his disappearance the night before.  The explanation seems redundant as there’s no indication of any follow-up action being taken against Ingimundur, either for Olgeir’s abduction or for what he did at the police station.  Olgeir then abruptly changes tack and, through the open car window, stabs Ingimundur in the upper arm.  The latter manages to drive off.  Salka, who had been sulking because of things her grandfather said to her the previous day and refused to make up by touching hands, is now understandably distraught.  She takes Ingimundur’s bloody hand in hers.

Things seem bound to end badly on this fateful road but no.  Ingimundur, by going crazy and confirming his worst fears, gets it all out of his system.  He stops his car, lifts Salka onto his shoulders and, though he tells her he’s tired, starts to retrace his steps in the direction whence the car came, carrying the girl, through a dark, empty tunnel below the road.  Here too, Pálmason achieves great impact in a sequence that works on a symbolic rather than a realistic level.  Ingimundur admits to Salka that ‘I’m sometimes a monster’ and makes a bellowing sound that echoes colossally in the tunnel.  Because A White, White Day has been almost unremittingly grim, viewers, like the hero, may experience the closing stages as cathartic.   In the very last sequence, seemingly a fantasy rather than a flashback, we see Ingimundur and his (unnamed) wife (Sara Dögg Ásgeirsdóttir) in the same room together, where he watches her do a seductive striptease to the accompaniment of ‘Memories’, a Leonard Cohen song.  The expression on Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson’s face is impressively beatific.  You don’t really believe it, or the whole conclusion to this singular film, but you feel grateful to Hlynur Pálmason that he too has finally put the bleak brakes on and turned around.

29 June 2020