A volcano of cinema

How the films of actor-director Baltasar Kormákur ignited the writer’s interest in Icelandic cinema

A still from Jar City

For many, Iceland is synonymous with Eyjafjallajokull, the volcano that erupted and disrupted hundreds of international flights, or the 2008-2011 financial crisis. My discovery of the country, however, came through its cinema. It happened by chance back in 2000 or 2001. I had a couple of hours to kill between meetings and found myself at the Curzon Soho, one of London’s flagship arthouse cinemas that is now sadly under threat of demolition to make way for a new railway line. One of the films being advertised was 101 Reykjavík , the directorial debut of actor Baltasar Kormákur. I knew nothing about the film, but the ravishing features of Victoria Abril, whose work I had enjoyed in Pedro Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989) and High Heels (1991), on the poster was enough to entice me into the cinema.

101 Reykjavík was a quirky delight where an unemployed young man who lives at home with his mother ends up having an affair with her lesbian lover. I immediately made a mental bookmark for Kormákur. I missed his next film The Sea (2002) and also A Little Trip To Heaven (2005), his English-language U.S. debut starring Forest Whitaker and Julia Stiles. However, I did catch his next film, the genetics-based detective procedural Jar City at the 2007 London Film Festival, and remember noting once again that Kormákur was a talent to track. The film reignited my interest in Icelandic cinema, and I sought out the DVD of Friðrik Þór Friðriksson’s Children of Nature (1991), a moving celebration of age, where an elderly man meets an old girlfriend at a senior citizens’ home and they escape in a stolen jeep to spend their last days together. The landscape captured in the film triggered memories of watching Dagur Kári’s Noi the Albino at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2003. I just hadn’t clocked that the film was Icelandic at the time, as it was one of the five films I watched that day. Incidentally, Kormákur also produced Kári’s Virgin Mountain (2015).

While I religiously continued to follow the Icelandic works of Kormákur, I was deeply disappointed by his

Contraband (2012), the Hollywood remake of Óskar Jónasson’s

Reykjavik-Rotterdam (2008) that was produced by Kormákur. The film featured a name cast of Mark Wahlberg, Giovanni Ribisi and Kate Beckinsale, but the effectively chilly atmosphere of the Icelandic original was replaced by a generic Hollywood treatment. The feeling of disappointment continued with Kormákur’s next Hollywood film,

2 Guns (2013), starring Wahlberg again alongside Denzel Washington, an altogether disposable caper.

Back at the Curzon Soho bar, I was debating

2 Guns with an actor friend of mine, when another actor/writer friend joined us along with a stranger. After expressing his surprise that our rag-tag group had any knowledge of Icelandic cinema at all, the stranger proceeded to launch a passionate defence of Kormákur’s Hollywood work. Turns out that he was an assistant director to Kormákur and the director was using the Hollywood paycheques towards producing quality Icelandic films. That effectively silenced any feeble criticisms we had for Kormákur after watching 2 Guns .