Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Hiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) are brothers. They live in adjacent houses in the middle of a wind-swept plain surrounded by bleak highlands in Iceland. They are sheep-farmers, living on the family land. Their two herds of beloved sheep are descendants of the family herds going back generations. It is a bleak and isolated – and yet loved – way of life. There’s a small bustling community nearby, separated from them by a long low bridge over an iced-over river, and that community also lives and dies by its sheep. Gummi and Hiddi, two grizzled wind-swept old dudes, see each other every day, working their separate barns and fields, driving out their herds of separate sheep. When they see each other from afar, they stop, stare, throwing daggers of still hostility across the space.
The two brothers have not said a word to one another in 40 years.
The film opens with a Ram competition among the farmers in the town. Hiddi’s ram wins first place because of its rounded fat back haunches. Gummi’s comes in second. When the two have to share a platform at the awards ceremony held at a community center, Gummi can’t stand it and walks away.
Why this situation has come to pass is just an incidental peripheral element of Rams, an astonishing and upsetting film from director Grímur Hákonarson (who also wrote the script). After directing a couple of shorts, and a couple of television spots, Hákonarson has moved into directing features, and Rams is the first film of his to gain traction outside of small festival circles. Within the first 5 minutes, it creates a horrible rip-tide of irresistible emotion. Backstory is not provided. So you discover what is happening in real-time. You are asked to catch up, or at least, follow along, all on your own.
After Hiddi’s ram wins the competition, Gummi wanders outside the community center, distraught, and walks among the rams waiting in a pen outside. He goes directly to Hiddi’s ram, and starts inspecting it, pulling back its gums, feeling its body, opening its eyes wide. The next day, he tells someone that his brother’s ram might have “scrapie.”
Now, I didn’t know what “scrapie” is, but you can believe I know now due to Google. It’s a plague among sheep, highly infectious, it attacks the nervous system. It’s transmissible. It’s fatal. And it means financial devastation to any sheep-herding community: every member of every herd must be slaughtered, just to be sure. But of course when I saw the film, “scrapie” had no meaning for me. It didn’t matter: The looks on people’s faces when the word “scrapie” was even mentioned told the whole story. The expressions showed the gong striking Doom at the heart of a community. Sheep are how they make their living, but more than that, sheep ARE their lives. The people care for them, and it’s an intimate kind of care-giving, almost like taking care of a dog. There is affection between owner and herd. To contemplate killing an entire herd because MAYBE they have “scrapie” is devastating.
Hiddi sees the “scrapie” accusation from his brother as an act of pure envy because he got first place in the ram competition. But it turns out Gummi was right. Scrapie has come to the community. Then follows town meetings, and veterinarians lecturing the town about what to do, and elected officials who organize the slaughters, and then organize the clean-ups afterwards. Everything must be burned. Scrapie can get into the wood of the pens. Scrapie can hide in the piles of hay the sheep eat.
Hiddi puts up resistance to the town’s scrapie-elimination campaign, and Gummi watches from his window as Hiddi is dragged, screaming, into a police car. Gummi’s face speaks volumes although you’re not quite sure what it is that you see there. There is a tormented scene where Gummi walks into his barn and looks at his herd. He touches them tenderly. He whispers to them reassuringly. He calls one of them “dear.” None of this is played sentimentally. It’s brutal, honest, open. It’s his last act of love before he shoots them all.
The story unfolds in bleak and ravishing beauty (the landscape similar to the endlessness of the steppe in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, with its metaphorical hugeness and stunning emptiness), with long stretches of silence where we feel the buildup of rage in the brothers, rage that has been nurtured like a fragile flickering candle. They’re comfortable in the status quo. There’s one extremely touching silent scene where Gummi cooks a rabbit for his Christmas dinner. By himself. And he’s changed into a woolly sweater-vest and slacks, dressing up for his dinner with himself.
Hiddi goes off the rails and it’s revealed that Gummi is not necessarily the squeaky-clean hero. The tension builds slow … slow …
Rams tells a story of a specific community with specific rhythms, it shows a glimpse of a world not often seen in film, a world we get to know. It introduces us to two brothers, their sturdily-maintained silence isolating them but also connecting them … but along with all this specificity the story is Shakespearean (how many enraged brother teams are there in Shakespeare? Fighting for dominance, for the crown, for the glory) and also Biblical, the Bible’s obsession with brothers from Cain and Abel to the Prodigal Son and beyond …
It’s specific and it’s also epic.
The silence helps elevate the story into its universal vastness. The style and look of the film (brilliant cinematography by Sturla Brandth Grøvlen) grounds it in its landscape but also blasts it up into the stratosphere. You could look at those volcanic hills and ice rivers and gigantic wind-swept spaces and read the History of the World. It’s open for that kind of projection. The acting is visceral, no other word for it, and it relies on silence, and reactions, and internal shifts not verbalized.
The second the film it ended, it started telescoping out in my mind, getting bigger … and bigger … and bigger … until it was almost unbearable.
Barely released in the States, it was one of the best films of last year. I would have included it on my Best of 2015 list if I had seen it in time.
I saw his 2010 feature Summerland which was a light satire, its humor was balanced by its intelligence. He’s a person to watch in the film industry, even if he had been primarily working in Icelandic.
I missed that one. I will definitely check it out. I’m quite intrigued by him.
Rams’ grounding in the specific local atmosphere reminds me of a quote I love from Henri Cartier Bresson about Marilyn Monroe (whom he photographed a lot):
“She’s American and it’s very clear that she is – she’s very good that way – one has to be very local to be universal.”
What a movie! I saw it last night and I keep thinking about it. I was amazed by the actor playing Gummi. There’s a great level of details — in the set, too. How assiduous he is when he writes, the boxes of puzzles in a corner, which he uses later, the shirt ripped at the elbow. The landscape (and the sweaters, ha) is very specific, but you’re right, it’s also universal. I grew up knowing people just like Gummi. If the way he touched the sheep or cut wood had been all fake, I would have spotted it. It was perfect, I recognized them. Even the way he looks at people when he is in the village, from “below”. So great.
That Christmas scene was quite something. He sings for himself, he cooks for himself, he has a gift for himself. But when his brother turns up, he takes care of him. He hasn’t spoken to him yet at that point, he hasn’t even fought back in the barn. But his drunk brother is naked on his couch, he covers him. He sits. Looks at him. Covers his feet. My heart broke!
There’s such tenderness. And it’s also funny! The “ambulance” scene was hilarious, another guy and I were just ROARING with laughter.
Oh my God – you mean when he dumps the body off at the hospital? and then drives off??
Or am I forgetting a scene?
// Oh my God – you mean when he dumps the body off at the hospital? and then drives off??//
YES! I was laughing so hard!
SO FUNNY. And in long-shot too. No close-ups!
I loved the hospital people standing outside like, “Wait … what is happening … what? HOLY SHIT!”
Kyrie – so glad you saw it! I really think it’s something special.
// I grew up knowing people just like Gummi. If the way he touched the sheep or cut wood had been all fake, I would have spotted it. It was perfect, I recognized them. //
Wow, what a great observation!! So often – if an outsider does a film like this – it comes off as condescending “look at the people who work the land” kind of thing. This felt extremely authentic.
That whole Christmas scene was unbelievable. His dinner for himself – and dressing up for it – just cracked my heart.
//Kyrie//
I love how, probably an autoccorect thingy, regularly transforms my name into Kyrie. It makes me feel all Christian, which doesn’t happen very often.:)
//So often – if an outsider does a film like this – it comes off as condescending “look at the people who work the land” kind of thing. This felt extremely authentic.//
Right. They are filmed beautifully, and it’s never condescending.
And you could see those actors had been doing their homework, because you don’t wake up one day in a fancy appartement in Reykjavík and know how to manipulate a ram. You have to go DO it.
I keep thinking about it, it really stayed with me. I’m so lucky to live where I live, there’s that movie theatre where I get to see all those cool movies. For the first time I found someone to bring with me to see “that kind of movie” — I usually go alone. He’d never been to that place, and he thought it would be all hipsterish, when really, it’s this old place that really smells like an old movie theatre, in the basement of a mall. You have to know it’s there. It’s where I saw Babadook, JP’s Taxi, The Wolfpack,… I just love it.
I love theatres like that, Kyrie. (hahaha – I’m so sorry, I didn’t even notice.)
// it’s this old place that really smells like an old movie theatre, in the basement of a mall. //
It sounds fabulous.
and yeah, I was just at a party last week and got into a conversation about Rams. It was so fun to talk with someone who had seen it, and fell in love with it.
I felt devastated by the ending – but also … I don’t know … the tenderness in it was just shattering. After 40 years of not speaking …
// I felt devastated by the ending – but also … I don’t know … the tenderness in it was just shattering. After 40 years of not speaking …//
Oh yes, also very cathartic. And from a guy who has so much violence in him!
I must add that my friend and I are very worried about the dog, too.:)
Oh man, that dog!! I know!
“The Adventures of kyrie and shelia”
… dying ….
It’s the joke that will never end. Thank you, Troll!