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There’s a scene about halfway through this disturbing but frustrating Icelandic film that puts everything before and after in such plain perspective that it threatens to upend the whole meaning of the production. A young Danish clergyman, Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), charged with building a church in a remote village on the Iceland coast in the late 1800s, is talking to his host, Carl (Jacob Lohmann), a fellow Dane and the nominal leader of the village, about the arduous journey the priest and his entourage of locals experienced in order to reach the village, a journey that claimed the life of at least one man and several pack animals. Carl asks, with genuine curiosity, why Lucas chose to sail to the opposite end of the island country and then travel on foot and horseback for weeks through forbidding terrain when he could have more easily sailed directly from Denmark to the village. Though we already know Lucas’s answer (“I want to get to know the country,” is how he explained it to his superior back in Denmark), the stark logic of Carl’s question injects another one into the viewer’s head: Why did the movie’s director, Hylnur Pálmason, put his protagonist through such hell based on such a flimsy rationale? Obviously, because he wanted to test the man, and show off Iceland’s unique landscape in the process.

There’s no getting around the effectiveness of this plot device—much of the first half of Godland (a purposefully ironic title) is a cinematic essay in how a natural environment can be at once monumentally beautiful and mortally terrifying—but given how the trip changes Lucas, whose religious piety is a manifestation of his privileged arrogance, the calculation on Pálmason’s part feels equally arrogant. The director compounds this connection by affecting ethnographic documentary qualities, such as a 4:3 aspect ratio and occasional scratches on a non-existent film surface. The analog between Lucas and Pálmason is further enhanced by the former’s avocation, photography, which necessitates the portage of a huge box camera, not to mention a crate of glass plates, over mountains and through raging rivers, just so that he can record the virgin country, usually with a local stevedore hired for the journey adding the human dimension. But the first inkling of Jacob’s overall attitude toward his fellow humans is his petulant reluctance to learn Icelandic (there are apparently as many ways to say “shut up” as there are words for “rain”), a trait that annoys his guide, Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurdsson), a burly, older man of endless resource whose temperament is to question the existence of anything he can’t see, smell, touch, or hear—like God. Though Ragnar saves Jacob’s life, after they arrive at their destination and he supervises the building of a church he would never attend, the enmity between the two men only becomes more intense. 

Pálmason’s narrative style is elliptical, so when Carl’s two daughters show up on screen without introduction it takes a few scenes to establish not only their relationship to each other, but their meaning within the story. The younger girl, Ida (Ida Mekkin Hlynsdóttir, the director’s daughter), exudes a weirdly cosmopolitan sensibility in the way she addresses Jacob about the religious versus the secular life, and while she does it to gauge his compatibility as a mate for her older sister, Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne), it’s obvious that such a match would never go over with Carl, who tolerates Jacob’s seething resentment of everything this place represents simply because he has to keep the village together—religion is something the Danish expats feel they need. But none of this melodramatic business gets at the heart of the hatred between Jacob and Ragnar, which is elemental under such circumstances, and by the time their conflict reaches its violent resolution you may wonder why, just as with Jacob’s preferred sea route, the movie couldn’t have gotten to where it was going with less fuss. 

In Danish and Icelandic. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Godland home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Assemble Digital Ltd. 

It’s been said by wiser cinema-heads than I that the romcom is dead, killed off by a post-modern critical attitude that doesn’t appreciate the irony that once made the genre appealing. My own take is that the classic trappings of romantic comedies—middle class, middle-brow aesthetics tied to a belief in the transcendant values of monogamous heterosexual love—no longer apply in a world where constant connectivity breeds cynicism toward human relationships. And I’d say that was a shame if I believed in middle class, middle-brow aesthetics in the first place, but the romcoms I’ve always liked—Preston Sturges’ work, Shampoo come to mind—are already cynical, so maybe I was never the target. At the moment, Korean cinema and TV series are thriving on romcom stories, and for the most part they blend the kind of snark I appreciate with the wettest sentimentality you could possibly stand, an often toxic combination that nevertheless keeps you awake to the possibilities of a particular story.

Love Reset is what used to be called high concept, meaning it was pitched for its gimmick—married couple about to get divorced are in an accident that leaves them with amnesia and thus open to the possibility of falling in love all over again—and, as is often the case with any Korean romcom, the story is so unwieldy and imprecise that there’s bound to be something there you like, if only for a minute or two. The introduction is promising: Perpetual law student Jeong-yeol (Kan Ha-neul) is drinking himself into a stupor because the love of his life, Na-ra (Jung So-min), is getting married to somebody else. Though the two have dated for some time, Na-ra, from a well-to-do family, doesn’t think Jeong-yeol, who is going for his fourth or fifth run at the bar exam, is ever going to amount to much, but at the altar she has a Graduate moment and bolts the ceremony, arriving at the bar where Jeong-yeol is blotto to declare her intentions. From here, the movie veers widely away from the path a Western romcom would take, with Na-ra’s family, understanding there’s no point in fighting it, offers to support Jeong-yeol while he studies again for the test, a development that makes Na-ra question her own future with him, and after they marry she finds she can’t stand his spendthrift ways (he’s determined to pay back his in-laws) and purity of purpose. She goes the opposite way by drinking constantly and leaving a mess wherever she goes, and her freelance movie production work suffers for it.

What’s promising about the setup is that after the two lose their memories their families and friends reverse course and endeavor to make sure they don’t get back together again, thus creating a tension between the different intentions at play. A lot of the comedy is self-referential (“this is like something out of a movie”) and the scatological humor might be a bit too ripe for some tastes, but as a sour look at the state of matrimony in Korea and the class pressures that work to its disadvantage it’s often amusing in a broad, slapstick way. In any case, I can’t see how anyone would want to marry either of these clowns.

In Korean. Opens March 29 in Tokyo at Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-675-0075), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

Love Reset home page in Japanese

photo (c) Cinema Woollim, TH Story and Mindmark