Un jour si blanc

Une étude de caractère d'un policier islandais, père, grand-père et surtout récemment veuf, qui découvre les secrets de sa défunte femme. Pas une enquête policière, mais un drame intimiste sur l'amour après la tombe, la déception et le pardon. Le sujet en apparence simple est rendu inhabituel par le récit, où le spectateur doit lui-même répondre à certaines questions, ainsi que par des inserts créatifs du scénario/montage, qui le rendent intéressant et singulier (captures d'écran de la météo islandaise, moniteurs de la police, chute de pierre, etc.). Et avec l'excellent Ingvar Sigurðsson. [Helsinki IFF] (29/09/2019)

Un drame islandais original et poétique qui se distingue par un superbe travail de caméra et par la performance d'Ingvar Sigurðsson dans le rôle principal, mêlant virilité et obstination avec une sensibilité délicate. Ce film subtil et magnifiquement réalisé explore la transformation psychologique d'un veuf qui, tout en gardant sa petite-fille, dissipe sa tristesse en travaillant sur la construction de sa maison familiale. Sa réaction au traumatisme lorsqu'il fouille dans les affaires de sa femme décédée est un défi silencieux suivi d'une éruption bruyante. (30/06/2019)

Statistically speaking, Iceland produces probably the most movies for a resident in Europe, which moreover can be seen worldwide at different festivals. On one hand it would be thanks to the locations, on the other thanks to the people who generally tend to like arts. The director Hlynur Palmason used both of those aspects to their fullest potential. Long story-telling and shots often create a great movie experience where you are watching, for example, a stone rolling down the hill or a shot of a building from a particular angle throughout all four seasons. Those shots are just beautiful. You are watching a dry land without a tree or just a single leaf, the mist that consumes those pointed rock-hills. I don’t know about you but for me it creates a totally Zen-like atmosphere. Unlike Ingvar Sigurðsson who makes me feel uneasy. Probably thanks to that fact his performance was excellent. His character didn’t speak much and that’s why he spoke through his body and mainly eyes. I’m almost not afraid to call it a new acting style. A great experience that actually is a standard for Iceland. Nevertheless this movie is more about the landscape than the dialogues, and therefore it is necessary to be prepared for that. (09/10/2020)

A White, White Day is an exceptionally compelling festival slow burner, thanks especially to the raw lyrical involvement of the breathtaking Icelandic countryside, the natural actors and the way Pálmason works with (Scandinavian) crime-film conventions. The film has a detective-movie structure due to the fact that the protagonist applies the modus operandi learned during his police service to address his own suffering. The strive to find and apprehend perpetrators. The problem lies in the fact that no particular person committed the crime that we see in the prologue (at most, Ingimundur himself was an accomplice, if it was a suicide and not an accident). Therefore, the protagonist essentially has to create a perpetrator in order to have something to solve. In the tradition of art cinema, particularly the inner world of the depressed widower is addressed; his disconnection from his own emotions and the world around him is best illustrated by the transformation of his relationship with his eight-year-old granddaughter. He first merely teases her and then scares her with a fictitious story about a stolen liver (which is connected with the key motif of the dead coming back to life, which is “resolved” in the last scene) and finally terrifies her with his own real behaviour. Besides the fine work with motifs (for example, the constant elimination of obstacles, from bloodstains to stones on the path, recalling unaddressed trauma), I also admired the certainty with which Pálmason “builds” long shots of tens of seconds (perhaps even a few minutes) with long segments of dialogue, complex emotions and a lot of action (and possibilities when something could go wrong). A White, White Day is a simple story told in a captivating manner with a tremendous emotional impact. 90% (31/07/2019)

Slow, depressive Icelandic films about sad freaks are already a sub-genre on their own. This one in particular drags a lot, at least at the beginning. On top of that, the main character is an unlikeable grumpy old man with no sympathy for anything or anyone, who repeatedly behaves like idiot to those around him while demanding others should be flawless. And, according to the film, they should understand and sympathise with him. I have the same problem I had with the recent Woman at War, also from Iceland. I like my Icelanders better with their famous black humour. #KVIFF2019 (02/07/2019)