Not knowing much about Iceland, I didn’t know what to expect when I popped White Night Wedding (DVD WHI) a movie by Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur into the DVD player. Touted as a comedy, it is the story of a professor named Jon. We first meet him teaching a class of bored students at a community college. Lecturing about moral relativism, he gazes out a window as though looking for someone—anyone---to come to his rescue. Life wasn’t supposed to be like this for Jon. Some years before, he and his artist wife had come to live on a remote island off the coast of Iceland, she to burn up the world with her art, and he, with his writing. Life dealt them harsh blows, though: her high spirits wobbled into emotional instability, then to madness, then to suicide. His writing doesn’t burn up the world; he struggles under the burden of his wife’s mental illness and her death, and he finds himself commuting by ferry to the college every day to teach. Then he meets a local island girl who is a student. She falls for the professor, and thinks she can save him from his sadness. After some plot twists and turns, they marry, and it’s happily ever after. Right? Watching this sequence of events unfold, we feel forebodings.
If you think this sounds like unpromising material for a comedy, I agree, and a big problem with this movie is its awkward mix of humor and tragedy that doesn’t gel into black comedy. We meet other islanders, including the mismatched parents of the young girl, some of the buffoonish friends of the professor, a lonely young minister, who is played for laughs, and some locals who, improbably enough, want to make the island a tourist destination, complete with golf course. The island is beautiful, gilded with the midsummer’s sun, with seascapes and soft green countryside looking like paradise to this landlocked Midwesterner. I found some of the humor rather broad, and laughed instead at the throw-away lines. For the first half hour of this movie, I was in a truly foreign world, where I didn’t know the people, the language, or their landscape, and had no point of reference, a world whose Norse heritage is thinly overlaid with European culture. This movie will pull you in, though, if you give it a chance. One test as to whether a movie is “good” or not is how it sticks with you after you’ve seen it. Some movies are like fast food: they are consumed quickly and then immediately forgotten. But a good movie will resonate in your imagination long after viewing, and the characters may haunt you. In this case, it is the character of the first wife who haunts. We think of her, on a remote island with no kindred souls, living with a husband who is decent, but emotionally remote. There was nothing or no one to slow her downward descent, and the lonely beauty of the island must have made her life all the more difficult. In my recollections of this movie, the antic humor has evanesced away, leaving only her dark image. Watch “White Night Wedding,” to see this absorbing slice of a world far away, and to have some smiles, but don’t expect a frothy comedy. (I have the feeling Icelanders just don’t do frothy comedy). Director Kormakur seems to be saying that life is a tangled mess of the horrible, the mundane, and the funny, and that we can’t lose ourselves, no matter to which island we may escape.
franm