Volaða land, Vanskabte Land

Hlynur Pálmason (2022)

It’s unusual and significant that the opening credits give the title in two languages – Danish and writer-director Hlynur Pálmason’s native Icelandic.  Both nationalities are represented in Godland and stubborn adherence to one tongue rather than the other causes repeated frustration, tension and misunderstanding.  Viewers ignorant of Danish or Icelandic but supplied with subtitles are in a privileged position that Pálmason’s characters rarely enjoy but maybe there’s something lost in this continuous translation, which insulates us from what the people on screen are experiencing.  Those of us who know nothing of the historical cultural relationship between Denmark and Iceland no doubt miss out on even more that matters in Godland.  But that still leaves plenty.

Subtitles are just about the only concession this challenging film makes to audience comfort.  Godland‘s first half describes a journey from Denmark to Iceland undertaken by Pálmason’s protagonist, the young Lutheran priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove).  His mission in Iceland is to supervise the building of a church in a coastal Danish settlement – the work to be completed before the next winter comes.  (The story is set in the mid-nineteenth century – presumably pre-1874, when Denmark first granted Iceland its own constitution and limited home rule.)  Lucas’s journey is arduous and watching it is hard going, too.  I’m not sure if the opening hour technically qualifies as ‘slow cinema’ but that’s certainly what it feels like.  There are repeated static shots and long takes; the awesome new landscape – Iceland often has the look of another planet, let alone another country – not only disorients Lucas but seems to transfix Hlynur Pálmason and Maria von Hausswolff, his gifted cinematographer (who shot both of Pálmason’s previous features, Winter Brothers (2017) and A White, White Day (2019)).  In terms of plot events, more things happen in the second half, once Lucas reaches his destination, but Godland is rarely a conventional drama.

In a prologue, set on the Danish mainland, a senior Lutheran priest (Waage Sandø) tells Lucas that he must adapt to Icelandic customs and Lucas sets out with apparently good intentions.  He could have sailed all the way to the settlement but opts for cross-country travel once in Iceland in order to ‘get to know’ what’s often referred to in the film as ‘the island’.  On the boat taking him there, Lucas starts to learn Icelandic under the guidance of an affable translator (Hilmar Guðjónsson).  Although bewildered by the multiplicity of Icelandic words for rain, Lucas is relatively easy with the translator, the only one of his companions who, like him, seems to be an educated man.  The priest is detached from – and doesn’t or can’t conceal his feelings of superiority to – the other Icelanders in the group, all labouring men.  On reaching land, they’re joined by an Icelandic guide, Ragnar (the charismatic Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson, the lead in A White, White Day), whose presence crystallises the growing ill feeling between Lucas and the others.  Ragnar doesn’t speak Danish, doesn’t trust Danes and doesn’t think the priest has a clue what he’s doing.  Despite Ragnar’s warnings, Lucas insists the men ford a deep, turbulent river.  The translator falls from his horse and drowns; another casualty is the cross the party has been carrying.  Lucas conducts an impromptu funeral service for the translator, who is buried in a shallow grave, quickly disturbed by a rising tide.  At this pivotal point in the narrative, Lucas loses both his sole ally and some of his faith in God.

Until now the priest has literally had a cross to bear but there’s another important encumbrance in the scheme of Godland – a camera with which Lucas intends to document the terra incognita of Iceland.  In these still early days of photography, taking pictures is a laborious process dependent on unwieldy equipment.  On the sea voyage the Icelanders are amused by the palaver of being photographed; when he steps on shore, Lucas stumbles under the weight of his equipment, which he carries on his shoulders.  His camera has a kinship of sorts with prize possessions of the heroines of both Out of Africa (1985) and The Piano (1993):  the load of crystal and china that Karen Blixen brings to Kenya (part of her European ‘baggage’); Ada McGrath’s musical instrument, which survives a sea crossing (and is her chief means of self-expression).  Lucas’s camera, however, shows different aspects of him at different points of the film.

During the journey through Iceland, Lucas’s commitment to recording what he sees, serves to express his curiosity but also – since it’s an objective curiosity – his lack of fellow feeling with the natives.  His later photography, in the Danish settlement, is something else.  Lucas stays in the home of Carl (Jacob Hauberg Lohmann), a carpenter involved in constructing the church; Carl has two daughters, Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne) and Ída (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdottír, Pálmason’s daughter, who has, as in A White, White Day, a wonderful natural vibrancy).  Lucas takes a picture of Ída, the younger girl, as she lies full-length on the back of her pony:  the child’s larking about makes for a remarkable image, which delights the cameraman.  A key illustration of his growing closeness to Anna, who looks to be in her twenties, comes in a shot of them side by side as Lucas develops a photograph.  The fundamental importance of photography in Godland is confirmed in Pálmason’s frequent use of 35-millimeter film, with square frames and rounded corners that create the look of old photographs.  I’m not sure why he felt the need to go further with introductory text on the screen that explains ‘A box was found in Iceland with seven wet plate photographs taken by a Danish priest. These images are the first photographs of the southeast coast. This film is inspired by these photographs’.  According to Wikipedia and to what Pálmason has said in interviews, this is invention on his part.

Physically exhausted and spiritually winded, Lucas is half-dead by the time he reaches his destination.  He’s taken unconscious into Carl’s home and put to bed in the basement there.  When Anna takes down a tray of food and opens the door, she’s shocked to find the priest naked; she apologises, exits quickly and calls upstairs, ‘He’s woken up’.  This moment is increasingly effective in retrospect.  It’s as if Lucas, through being introduced in a state of complete vulnerability to Anna, can be emotionally open with her as with no one else – though he gets on well too with her younger sister.  Ída is as intrigued by the family’s lodger as Carl is mistrustful of him.  The Icelandic landscape and forces of nature repeatedly eclipse the worldview with which Lucas arrives in the country.  Alone in his tent, even as he prays, he tells God, ‘You need not be here’.  As he recovers physical strength, his faith also seems to revive – at least if what he says to Ída, eager to know more about his relationship with God, is to be believed.  The priest’s chilly observance of religious proprieties also returns with a vengeance:  he refuses to conduct the wedding ceremony of a local couple because it can’t take place in the new church, as yet unfinished.

The marriage is celebrated instead in a community get-together, which Lucas does attend.  This largely jolly occasion, a rare upbeat interlude in the film, could even be described, despite its secular nature, as a religious gathering – of a community bound together by shared cultural tradition.  There’s music and dancing – Ragnar, who has stayed on in the settlement to help with the church’s construction, plays the accordion.  There are short wrestling contests, in which the winner chooses his next opponent.  Carl demands Lucas who, after initial protest, steps forward; Carl shows him the basic moves; the priest proves a surprisingly quick learner and comes out on top.  It’s other people who then call for Ragnar to take on Lucas.  They wrestle for some time, without a winner emerging.  The episode thus ends on an uneasy note: the outcome of this last wrestling bout is less an honourable draw than it’s tensely unfinished business.

With the church finally ready for use, Ragnar prepares to take his leave but first asks Lucas, on the beach with his camera, to take his photograph.  Lucas not only refuses but harshly insults Ragnar and the latter’s reaction is no less surprising.  He launches into a confession, first that he can speak Danish after all, then of his various sins.  When Lucas collapsed en route to the settlement, Ragnar says he was happy to leave him to die.  Ragnar was also responsible for the recent theft and killing of Lucas’s horse.  When he asks for the priest’s forgiveness, Lucas snaps.  He lunges at Ragmar, pushes him to the ground (the unfinished business) and beats his head against the rocks, killing him.  Lucas then returns to Carl’s cabin.  He finds Anna alone there and they have sex.

Godland is clearly no kind of endorsement of missionary Christianity; quite how anti-religious it intends to be is harder to say.  When Lucas refuses to conduct the marriage because the church isn’t ready, Carl tells him, ‘You’re an odd one’ and he’s not wrong.  One naturally assumes, particularly given the historical context, that Pálmason’s priest’s attitudes and struggles are meant to be typical of the breed but it’s not just Lucas’s increasingly bizarre behaviour that makes it hard to see him as representative.  Throughout the story, he lurches between impulsiveness and enervation.  Elliott Crosset Hove, with his bony pallor, creates such a distinctive, complex character – aloof, raw, diligent, aggressive – that it’s impossible to emerge from the film thinking, ‘Yes, I bet they were all like that’.  The film doesn’t condemn its protagonist in a conventional way:  Pálmason, rather than suggesting that Lucas is a holier-than-thou hypocrite for having extra-marital sex with Anna, presents his carnal side as his more human side.

When Lucas begins to speak in the finished church’s inaugural service, he soon faces competition from a crying babe-in-arms in one of the pews and the insistent barking of a dog outside.  These interruptions, whose aftermath paves the way for Pálmason’s powerful finale, are a brilliant touch.  The barking dog, which belonged to Ragnar, is an insistent reminder to Lucas of his terrible crime.  The racket struck this sometime churchgoer as a fine example too of how easily the spell of a religious service is broken by mundane distractions:  like coughs and sneezes in a congregation, the noise of the dog and the baby make their presence felt more strongly than the Holy Ghost invoked in the words that Lucas speaks.  He goes outside to shush the dog and, as he approaches it, slips on the muddy ground.  He measures his length and gets up with his priest’s robes and his face caked in mud.  It would be too humiliating to return to the service.  He mounts one of Ída’s horses and heads off into wilder, barren terrain.

The prosaic mishap that causes Lucas’s sudden flight contrasts startlingly with the grim consequences of his departure.  Carl, who has warned Anna not to get involved with Lucas and now refuses to promise her that he won’t harm him, despite her pleas, goes on horseback in pursuit of the priest and soon catches up with him – still an inexperienced rider, Lucas has gone too fast and tired his mount.  Carl, with a businesslike manner, fatally stabs Lucas, telling him that everyone will simply assume he fell from his horse.  This killing, like the killing of Ragnar, comes as a shock and, at one level, is hard to make sense of – yet both are believable.  The first is the violent culmination of Lucas’s loss of control.  The second expresses Carl’s conviction that the settlement will be better off without Lucas in it.  Except that he still is in it.  One of Pálmason’s outstanding images (in a very keen competition) is a shot in which the corpse, then skeleton, of Lucas’s first horse – the one that Ragnar killed – changes and decays through passing seasons.  This anticipates the last sequence of Godland in which Ída, at some point in the future, comes upon Lucas’s remains.  She weeps but reassures him he’ll soon be part of nature – another way of saying that the priest has yielded to the land that he and his beliefs could never get the better of.  The closing credits are accompanied by a choir singing a patriotic Danish song.  The effect is ironic and stirring.

2 April 2023