The Sea | AccessAtlanta

The Sea

Maria and Agust must sort out the ramifications of the family patriarch's wishes.

FILM FACTS

Starring: Gunnar Eyjolfsson and Hilmir Snær Gudnason
Director: Baltasar Kormakur
Rating: Not rated, but there is strong language, sex, violence and nudity
Genre: Drama, Foreign
Language: In Icelandic and English, with subtitles

Discuss this film | Official movie site

See showtimes (Not rated) 109 minutes

Grade: B

Verdict: A family-skeleton dance that rattles your bones, even if it does spin into melodrama.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The family reunion in Baltasar Kormakur's "The Sea," Iceland's Oscar nominee last year for best foreign-language film, is part soap opera, part Strindberg, part dark farce. The different tones don't always blend smoothly, but it's still a pretty compelling tale.

Set in a remote fishing village where wandering reindeer co-exist with pizza deliveries and video games, "The Sea" draws weighty comparisons between the health of a dying community and that of a living-dead family, whose patriarch has been the town's emblematic leader since the '50s. Thordur (Gunnar Eyjolfsson), the imperious but aging owner of the local fishing plant, is being slowly squeezed out by multinational corporations. His son, Haraldur (Sigurdur Skulason), who manages the family business, wants his father to sell to a larger company, divvy up the profits and retire with his second wife, Kristin (Kristbjorg Kjeld), to a shiny apartment in Reykjavik.

However, Thordur is the inverse of King Lear. He wants to hold on to his power, not hand it over to his children. So he summons Haraldur's siblings home to settle accounts. Accounts are settled, but not necessarily in the way Thordur intended.

Agust (Hilmir Snær Gudnason), Thordur's designated but uninterested replacement, lives in Paris with his beautiful pregnant girlfriend, Francoise (Helene de Fougerolles). He still hasn't told his father that the funds the old man sent him for business school have, instead, gone to supporting his floundering career as a songwriter. Ragnheidur (Gudrun S. Gisladottir), Thordur's only daughter, has a clueless husband, a weird son and a failed career as a filmmaker. She's been estranged from her father ever since she was raped as a teenager and Thordur's compassionate response was something about "idiots raping idiots."

Still living at home are Maria (Nina Dogg Filippusdottir), Kristin's hottie daughter, who still hasn't gotten over her crush on Agust, and Kristin's mother (Herds Porvaldsdttir), a blunt-speaking crone who's never gotten over the fact that, as far as she is concerned, the wrong daughter (Thordur's first wife and Kristin's sister) died.

Never mind family-reunion T-shirts. This clan is more likely to hand out personalized knives. In this household, whoever stabs who in the back last, wins. There's always something watchable about this family free-for-all, in which every uncovered secret is worse than its predecessor. Unfortunately, Kormakur goes all-out, too often giving in to the film's implicitly overheated melodrama.

"Sounds like a close family, " says Francoise, en route to Iceland. "Don't even try to understand it," rejoins Agust.

Not such bad advice for moviegoers, either.