Héraðið
Grímur Hákonarson (2019)
It’s not every week you see two films from Iceland – A White, White Day, followed by The County. The first, needless to say, has been labelled Nordic noir; the second, in terms of its basic David-and-Goliath scenario, might suggest Icelandic Ealing. Not Ealing comedy, though – or that’s what I thought having sat through The County. Yet Wikipedia terms it a comedy (and IMDb as ‘comedy, drama’). Some people are easily amused.
Tonally different as they are, A White, White Day and The County have points in common. Both are the work of writer-directors. Both have rural settings and landscape is an important expressive element. Both feature middle-aged protagonists who discover something unexpected and disturbing about the much-loved spouse they’ve lost in a road crash, and are mourning. In Grímur Hákonarson’s film, Inga (Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir) helps her husband Reynir (Hinrik Ólafsson) run their dairy farm, which is seriously in debt. The regional rural economy is controlled, with an iron grip, by a long-established agrarian co-operative, headed by the discreetly malignant Eyjólfur (Sigurður Sigurjónsson). Originally set up as a means of ensuring a fair economic deal for farmers, the co-op has warped into an oppressive commercial monopoly. It purchases its members’ produce and forbids them to buy supplies independently, even though they could so less expensively.
In the aftermath of Reynir’s death, Inga is faced with a triple whammy. First, she learns that the farm, which has been in her husband’s family for generations, is in much deeper debt than she’d realised. Next, she finds out that Reynir, with no other means of keeping the co-op off his back and thus holding on to the farm, was a key part of their virtual protection racket, informing on other farmers whose commercial practice broke the co-op’s rules. Then she’s told that medical and other evidence suggests his fatal crash wasn’t an accident. Inga tells her two adult children their father took his own life but not what drove him to do so. She takes to her Facebook account to denounce the co-op as the ‘Icelandic mafia’, and gets plenty of media publicity as a result, but she doesn’t go public about how it exploited Reynir. Why don’t these things happen? From Grímur Hákonarson’s point of view, it isn’t time yet.
Refusing to give in immediately to the co-op by declaring herself bankrupt, Inga instead launches a campaign of resistance to their iniquitous operations. This isn’t as eventful (or as entertaining) as might be expected. When Eyjólfur’s piggy enforcer warns her about importing cheap fertiliser from Reykjavik, Inga chucks a shovelful of the import on the windscreen of his car. Having first threatened to sell her milk online instead of to the co-op, she then drives her red tractor into town and sprays milk over the co-op building. That’s about it until she has the idea of creating an independent outfit to protect her and her fellow dairy farmers’ interests. She and a couple of Reynir’s friends knock on a few doors. Next minute, Inga’s proposal is on the agenda for a plenary meeting of the co-op membership. (Media interest in her crusade seems to have dried up by now.)
Inga introduces the proposal, to gales of applause. Eyjólfur sneaks in and comes to the platform. One of Inga’s supporters complains that Eyjólfur isn’t entitled to speak (why not?) but he’s not to be deterred. The reaction he gets suggests he’s won the audience over (how come?); the person who said Eyjólfur had no right to address the meeting is now struck dumb (why?). Inga therefore has to speak again, this time from the floor. Now’s the moment to go public on Reynir’s dirty work for the co-operative and how he couldn’t live with the shame of it. More acclaim (this is a rapidly volatile group of voters). When a show of hands is called, Grímur Hákonarson keeps the camera close up on Inga’s face – to increase the suspense! It takes only about three seconds to do the count: you’re inclined to wonder if nearly everyone in the room – there must be around a hundred people – sat on their hands, despite all the noise they’ve been making with them. Whatever, the proposal is passed, to a final burst of thunderous applause, but Inga hardly has time to celebrate before she’s evicted from the farm. She doesn’t bother to tell any of her allies (or her children) about this. She just lets her dairy herd wander into the fields, puts her dog in the car, and drives away. It’s Time to Move On. Simple as that.
The County starts with Inga, calmly determined, helping a cow to calf; feeding a queue of hungry cows is the last thing we see her do before the co-op delivers its eviction order. The farming sequences hardly amount to the ‘rich … specific procedural detail’ commended in Sophie Monks Kaufman’s Empire review but they’re fine as context – and the brief scenes of Inga and Reynir together are good. They don’t say much to each other, for several reasons. They have to work so hard to keep the farm going they’ve hardly the energy for conversation but you get a sense in these sequences, too, of a strong, longstanding mutual affection that isn’t emotionally demonstrative. On Raynir’s part, of course, the lack of words is also a matter of concealment. The County starts promisingly but the longer it goes on, the cruder it gets. Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir, a well-known stage and screen actress in Iceland, is naturally credible and commanding but Inga is at the centre of a primitive piece of storytelling. Hinrik Ólafsson’s Raynir is the first of numerous burly, bearded men in evidence. All the others are such sketchy characters that none stands out from the hirsute crowd. Lean, clean-shaven Sigurður Sigurjónsson (one of the police officers in A White, White Day and the co-lead in Grímur Hákonarson’s previous feature, Rams) can’t fail to make more impression as Eyjólfur.
Despite questioning its ‘comedy’ credentials, I did find things in The County amusing. For any Briton of my generation and background, the many subtitles referring to ‘the Co-op’, and its characterisation as a bastion of baleful protectionism, are bound to be funny. The closing sequence, where Inga sings along to a wry motivational song playing on her car radio, also raised a smile. It made me wonder if the material would have been better as a full-scale musical (The Co-op!). As for intentional humour, though, I couldn’t see either the ‘absurdist comedy’ or the ‘bone-dry black comedy’ that Mark Kermode perceives. He’s far from alone in admiring The County. It sometimes seems that a film needs only to evoke a politically significant theme for right-on critics to decide it’s thereby explored the theme thoroughly – hence the praise for Hákonarson’s treatment of globalisation, the resilience of community, and so on. It’s true that, as I write this, there are only 23 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes but they’re nearly all from British and North American critics, and they’re nearly all positive – I’m not sure the RT designation ‘fresh’ is appropriate in this case. The County is a comedy in the sense of being yet another foreign-language arthouse film that, had it been made in English, might well have been critically laughed off the screen.
4 July 2020
