As elegantly as the camera wanders through the picturesque but merciless scenery or the reindeer herd blocking the wintry streets, this complex and bold, 2002 paraphrase of several themes from Shakespeare's King Lear to the Parable of the Prodigal Son carefully balances over the borders of various genres of black comedy and powerful, bitter family drama, following at the same time in the footsteps of Henrik Ibsen and Ingmar Bergman, urging the audience to "se sanningen i vitögat"—face up to the harsh reality.

Just like in Ibsen's symbolist drama, Baltasar Kormákurs cleverly built up masterpiece adapted from the play of Ólafur Haukur Simonarson starts when the major part of the plot of the story has already unfolded: at the turning point of the lives of an extended, dysfunctional Icelandic family's members. The children— Ágúst (Hilmir Snær Guðnason), the youngest who now lives in Paris with his pregnant French misstress; Ragnheiður (Guðrún Gísladóttir), the middle child, who following her failure as a film maker returned home to live in a fantasy world; and the oldest, fishery-worker Haraldur (Sigurður Skúlason)—are summoned by their ageing, rather old-fashioned and controlling father, Thordur (Gunnar Eyjólfsson), a wealthy owner of the local fish processing plant in a remote hamlet in the embrace of Iceland's own "magic mountain" who is planning on writing his memoir and divide up his precious kingdom between his offsprings. Even though the theme of the old and wise father archetype inviting home his children to find his proper heir among them is not entirely unfamiliar for today's viewers, in the director's unique rendition the popular folktale about the three siblings trying their luck in life gains a special, ironic dimension as if the story teller had chosen to deliver us a twisted, bitter parody, extending the family with a naughty, foul-mouthed grandmother, bickering brothers and sisters, an ever-drunken clothing store owner sister-in-law and an unmotivated, zombie-like grandchild. Despite the strong presence of comical elements, is worth to remember though that in accordance with the Chekovian traditions, humour often serves to mask an enormous amount of pain and trauma one has needed to gone through.

It turns out that the pariarch, Thordur has refused to modernize his plant due to his stubbornness or in the interest of keeping the business in local hands to preserve the jobs and clinging to traditions in an excessive way which results in denying the fact of the approaching globalisation and preventing his greedy but at the same time deeply suffering children from collecting their inheritances. Although as in most of the popular folktales and fables the third and youngest child manages to stray furthest from the intoxicated family nest and even though his dad’s choice falls on him as a perfect candidate to take over the fishing empire, soon it becomes quite clear that these hopes were just as vain as the attempts of the other family members to escape from their environments as Águst had already squandered the business school money supplied by his father to pursue dreams as an aspiring musician.

The polar bear-like old mogul—just like some modern day, male Icelandic version of Gertrude from Shakespeare’s Hamlet—is now married to his dead wife’s younger sister—unanimously hated by all of the children—with whom he was enjoying a long-term affair already during the time of the other woman’s slow dying. The well-known characters of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Autumn Sonata would be overshadowed in an eventual contest of exploding in rage, jealousy and tantrums in response to childhood trauma and emotional neglect in comparison with the protagonists of this story who from the very arrival of the “lost son” Águst gradually reveal all their skeletons in the closet—a whole web of dirty little secrets, a cold palette of anger, greed, repressed desires and embittered lives, a long record of incest an abuse make their entrance and parade through the silver screen in front of our baffled eyes building the pathway towards the total self-destruction of the characters.

Wading through the several essays and reviews written in different languages by various leading magazines in preparation for this article, I was extremely surprised and admittedly disappointed to find out that even those that praised this work barely scratched the surface of the incredibly rich net of allusions, symbolism and searching for answers to the evergreen problems in life, while those who despised it easily dismissed it as some usual “melodramatic soap opera” containing the common ingredients of unintelligible Iceladic humour, red herrings, desolate mountain peaks, family conflicts and despicable, malicious characters.

While applying these labels it is impossible though not to notice how remarkably the film is inspired by a number of playwriters, novelists who lived at the dawn of modern literature and whose body of work provide a whole sea of material to be explored in almost all the films of the director.

Among the numerous influences worth to be mentioned the most tangible ones are the plays of William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekov. By each of them ignoring their own little skeletons of hidden family secrets, the characters of The Wild Duck, The Cherry Orchard and Ivanov—the latter play was placed into our modern age and adapted to screen by Kormákur himself under the title White Night Wedding (Brúðguminn)—whether they live in the Russian prairies, in a provincial Norwegian town, or on the island of Flatey in Brúðguminn (similar in its remoteness to the rugged fishing village in The Sea or the landscape of Kormákur’s other film, Djúpið, The Deep), all share in common that they find it unrealistic to break free from their dreamword full of “basic lies” that make life possible to live. In Orpheus Descending  written by Tennessee Williams almost all the inhabitants of the sleepy Southern town are jailed inside their own cage of their shattered lives without any small glimmer of hope of ever escaping. In Dezső Kosztolányi’s novels set in at the turn of the 19 and 20. century a fictional Hungarian village called Sárszeg, the protagonist having failed at every level chooses to commit suicide as the only possible option to end the long-endured misery. At the end of White Night Wedding, the portrayal of professor Jon turns out somewhat different as he decides to stay alive and marry his young ex-student but it soon becomes clear that this is also a sublime form of suicide, happening gradually and performed in a more gentle manner, neglecting the facts for a long-long period of time.  

At the beginning of The Sea, Krisitn who has only recently transformed from lover to wife questions the necessity of ever telling the truth. In The Wild Duck chasing after some misty ideals, the figure of Gregers quickly becomes some kind of failed doppelgänger of Hamlet in search of the truth. Furthermore, he used to work on a plant in the mountains where he tried to get in touch with “the common men”, just as the ageing patriarch Thordur sympathizes with his local people but ironically they fail to recognize his caring attitude and work in his fishery thus making way for immigrant workforce and large corporations threatening to take over. The character of the old Werle bears remarkable resemblances with Thordur, being equally despotic and keeping a maratonic list of covered-up secrets and schemes, enough to think of little Hedvig who is no other than his natural daughter, just like cousin Maria who turns out to be Thordur’s daughter from his relationship with Kristin. The clumsy attempts of „rooting out the unhealthy” or uniting a shipwrecked family end with fatal consequences for everyone.

Blessed with a wonderful richness of symbols from the music score to the visual elements, the presence of nature, the physical desolation of the fishing village (strangely different from the stereotypical picture people usually harbour in their heads thinking of Iceland), as well as the azure-white rainbow of the sea and the unforgiving, untamed icy mountains in Hafið serve to highlight the melancholy, the desperation and isolation of the family members although some may argue that the vibrant colours help to create a contrast between the liveliness of the nature and the dull numbness of the characters. The geological elements such as the bleak landscape, the dark-blue waves of the sea and the graceful peaks may also symbolize the scale of choices that turn up in their lives even though they fail to recognize this and rather remain incapable of escaping either physically or emotionally from their own world. The children of Thordur, especially the oldest one, Haraldur try to comply with the ongoing changes and modernize the fishing trade but interestingly and ironically, their children, the teenager grandchild generation does not even care to revolt anymore as video-games and hamburgers mean the epitome of excitement in their indifferent eyes.

Seeking for answers to several universal questions can be traced in the film on various levels although several critics interpret the confrontation of the family’s members as a general conflict that can be magnified onto a global screen, symbolizing Iceland’s stance against the EU and its place in the growing process of globalisation, questioning the roles of traditions and how far one should go in order to preserve them.

Watching Baltasar Komrákur’s piece, one may ask if it is ever possible break away from all the inherited sins and lead a healthy life in well-balanced, harmonious family without carrying on the ancestors’ harmful legacy, is there any way for identifying and accomplishing our goals without being stigmatized as irresponsible or is it really so that no freedom of choice exists in life but all that remains is the tragicomical series of events and grey weekdays to deal with?

Judit Hollós is a playwright, screenwriter, poet, essayist and journalist. Her short stories, poems, translations and articles have been featured in English, Swedish and Hungarian in literary magazines and anthologies across the globe. She is the author of two chapbook collections of Japanese poetry and short prose. Her monologues and plays have been presented and received readings at theaters and festivals in Glasgow, San Francisco, New York, London, Manchester and Kyiv.