REVIEWS PANORAMA


Nor. 2011. 72mins Director/screenplay Ole Giaever Production company Ferdinand Films International sales Bavaria Film International, www. bavaria-film.de Producers Karin Julsrud, Ole Giaever Cinematography Oystein Mamen Editors Wibecke Ronseth, Astrid Skumsrud Johansen Music Ola Flottum Main cast Marte Magnusdotter Solem, Ellen Dorrit Petersen


The Mountain REVIEWEDBY LEE MARSHALL


The kid is not all right in The Mountain (Fjellet), an intense Nor- wegian relationship drama about a lesbian couple who attempt to find some kind of closure by returning to the remote moun- tain where their young son died. Impressively directed, with beautifully composed figures-in-a-landscape photography and utterly authentic performances from the two leads, this is never- theless a dramatically thin tale which struggles to fill out its barely feature-length running time. On one level, the film is an intense and in many ways gruelling


chamber drama whose slow-burn pacing and one-note theme will challenge its audience’s patience. But it also aspires to some- thing bigger and more commercial in its shades-of-Hollywood soundtrack and three-act march towards dramatic resolution. This strategy could just backfire, as the sort of cineastes who are up for feature-length grief in the cold north may be turned off by these little shoves of sentiment. We first see Solveig (Petersen) and Nora (Solem) in the set-


ting they will occupy throughout: walking in a desolately beau- tiful snow-dusted mountain landscape, rucksacks on their backs. There is clearly some tension between them, and the rea- sons for it are slowly dosed out in a series of revelations. The couple are here, it becomes clear, because their five-year-


old son Vetle — who is Nora’s biological child — fell to his death on this same mountain two years previously. Outwardly uncom- plicated blonde Solveig has forced the trip on the reluctant Nora, a private, controlling soul who finds it difficult to talk about what happened, or indeed to talk about Vetle at all. Resentment eddies between the two like the snowflakes


which begin to fall ever more insistently as they climb towards their destination. They argue about whether they have enough coffee, and about how to set up the tent, with Nora hyper-critical and Solveig feeling unjustly persecuted. The film’s two spaces — the infinite wilderness and the cramped confines of the tent — play off against each other, suggesting perhaps that we carry our prisons with us, or that nature is not always a healer. Still long shots of the increasingly dark and forbidding moun-


tain scenery alternate with extreme hand-held close-ups of the women’s faces as they argue, sulk and make up. Petersen and Solem are both excellent as two partners who know their rela- tionship is close to breaking point, neither of whom want to deal it the killer blow by letting the unspoken accusations spill out. When they eventually do, the timing is just a little too pre-


dictable; so, too, is the resolution which follows. Held restrain- edly in check for much of the film, Ola Flottum’s piano score brings on the organ and choir effects as the denouement unfolds. The film’s soundscape is more delicate, using micro- phone-in-the-wind effects which accompany the two women’s muffling of their true feelings.


PANORAMA


Jap. 2011. 149mins Director Yoshihiro Fukagawa Production company Into the White Night Film Partners International sales Gaga, www.gaga.co.jp Producers Satoka Kojima, Hiromi Honoki, Ryuta Inoue, Kazunari Hashiguchi Screenplay Yoshihiro Fukagawa, Shingo Irie, Akari Yamamoto, from the novel by Keigo Higashino Cinematography Koichi Ishii Editor Naoya Bando Production designer Namiko Iwaki Music Mamiko Hirai Main cast Maki Horikita, Kengo Kora, Eiichiro Funakoshi


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Into The White Night REVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROMNEY


“This isn’t a novel,” comments a character in Japanese mystery saga Into The White Night (Byakuyakou), with some consider- able irony. Adapted from a bestseller by Keigo Higashino, this feature by Yoshihiro Fukagawa (Peeping Tom, and Japanese hit Dear My Love) is itself an extremely novelistic, densely plotted, genre-hopping narrative which begins as a straightforward murder mystery, takes off into veritably Dickensian realms as it maps Japanese society high and low, then loops back in a protracted whodunit denouement, taking in some wild melodrama en route. It is sometimes difficult to know whether the tale is plotted


with audacious complexity, or just a labyrinthine picaresque meander, but viewers should be fascinated — at least in those stretches where the story comes into focus. Too unwieldy and diffuse for widespread appeal, Into The White Night might score some points internationally if its outré Twin Peaks mys- tery aspect is played up. The film begins in 1980, in an impoverished slum area bor-


dered by thick reeds, where a pawnbroker named Kirihara is found murdered. A massive investigation is mounted, and sus- picion points to the dead man’s employee, Matsuura, who had been romancing his wife, and a local woman, Mrs Nishimoto, whom Kirihara was seeing. The investigation leads to no firm conclusion and is dropped, but one lowly detective involved, Sasagaki (Funakoshi), obsessively presses on with the case. From there on, the film skips confusingly over the years, in


two strands of narrative. One involves Mrs Nishimoto’s daugh- ter, Yukiho (Horikita), a strangely detached beauty who, follow- ing a virtuous high-school career, effortlessly climbs the social ladder until, through marriage to a spoilt society boy, she becomes a powerful player in the fashion world. The other strand follows Kirihara’s emotionally damaged son, Ryoji (Kora), a moody loner with a dysfunctional sex life and a talent for ornate paper-cutting artistry. As the years pass — via several references to 1980s ephemera


such as Sony Walkmans and Pretty Woman — the film skips with merry abandon from location to location. Finally the story comes full circle, though the explanatory last half-hour is wildly over-extended, and audiences may have twigged long before Sasagaki exactly what is at stake. Throughout, it is the generic figure of the obsessive sleuth


who appears intermittently to provide continuity and get the mystery story back on the rails. The film’s deliriously convo- luted complexity is exacerbated teasingly by play with identity, with characters — and there are very many, coming and going with alarming abruptness — frequently changing appearance or behaving differently depending on what social milieu they have moved into.


n 12 Screen International in Berlin February 15, 2011


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