A White, White Day: Acclaimed Icelandic film masterfully releases the steam of bottled emotions
By Karen Gordon
Rating: A
A tour-de-force performance and a spare, controlled narrative makes for an engrossing film about love, grief and other delicate emotional complexities in Icelandic writer/director Hlynur Palmason’s second feature film A White, White Day.
The story revolves around a stoic widower Ingimundur, played by Ingvar Sigurðsson, a police chief in a small town in Iceland.
Ingvar Sigurðsson is a repressed widower, whose only emotional support is his granddaughter
He’s in the process of renovating a building slightly out of town where he spends a lot of time. He is a doting grandfather - more like a second father - to his to 8 year old granddaughter Salka (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir). She’s his constant shadow, trailing after him as chatty and full of life as he is silent.
They are opposites, but still so close that they’re like two peas in a pod. Their relationship takes up the most screen time and is part of the center of the film. But the real emotional story is buried deep in Ingimundur.
He’s lost his wife relatively recently. And as we see in an early scene, in spite a psychologist’s attempts to draw him out, Ingimundur isn’t going to willingly have his feelings coaxed out of him. It’s clear from his reaction that he hasn’t fully taken it in, or processed it and is quick to tamp down whatever bubbles up.
When his daughter drops off a box of his late wife’s belongings, Ingimundur first tries to resist opening it, but can’t. In the box, he finds evidence that his wife was having an affair and that pushes him into action: he begins to stalk her lover.
This sounds like the plot of any one of a number of film noirs. And, at points, it seems like that’s where we’re being taken. But Pálmason is after something else here. And he takes us there in a movie that is patient and restrained.
The storytelling is kept spare. We see neither a human character nor hear a word of dialogue for almost the first six minutes. And yet, he has our attention. As well, although the story is linear, it’s not a conventional story structure and there isn’t a lot of exposition.
We get little about the backstory of Ingimundur. The action is all present tense. Pálmason gives us enough to hold the story together, but not much more. Some of the relationships aren’t fully developed. We don’t fully understand how some things are the way they are.
Ingimundur shows up at the police station regularly, but never in uniform and never for work. There are times when the screen is taken up by things we’re not quite interested in. For instance, at one point we get a few minutes of a slightly macabre children’s TV show about aging and death. It’s all going somewhere of course. Pálmason is very much in control of the pace of the film and is able to ratchet up the tension or emotion when he needs to in moments without resorting to trickery.
In a film this quiet, the other elements are beautifully calibrated as well. And that includes the moody score by Edmund Finnis, and the beautiful cinematography of Maria von Hausswolff.
This is one of those intensely intimate movies that I wish I had been able to see on a large screen. When properly done, as it is here, the larger the screen, the more visceral the quiet spaces.
Pálmason gives us enough to hold the story together, but not much more. The net result is a movie that completely avoids histrionics and feels genuine.
He is mightily helped in this by the performance of his two leads. Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir is superb as the loving granddaughter. She’s the energetic centre of so much of what we seen. The role demands a range of emotions and reactions from her and every moment of their time on screen together feels true.
Ingvar Sigurðsson’s work as the emotionally buttoned down man - which won an acting award at Cannes - is a master class in subtlety. In a performance that is as contained as you will see on screen, his Ingimunder is as silent and still as a tree, but as things unfold, we’re aware there is something else going on for this silent man.
Pálmason trusts that the audience will understand, which leads A White, White Day to a profound and hauntingly relatable conclusion.
A White, White Day. Directed by Hlynur Palmason. Starring Ingvar Sigurðsson and Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir. A White, White Day is distributed by Game Theory Films in Canada and will be released by select virtual theatres on Friday, May 29, including the Paradise Theatre in Toronto, Vancity in Vancouver and Calgary IFF . It will be available on iTunes Canada on Tuesday, June 16.