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<\/a><\/p>\n\nGummi (Sigur\u00f0ur Sigurj\u00f3nsson) and Hiddi (Theod\u00f3r J\u00fal\u00edusson) 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. <\/p>\n
The two brothers have not said a word to one another in 40 years. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Why this situation has come to pass is just an incidental peripheral element of Rams<\/i>, an astonishing and upsetting film from director Gr\u00edmur H\u00e1konarson (who also wrote the script). After directing a couple of shorts, and a couple of television spots, H\u00e1konarson has moved into directing features, and Rams<\/i> 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. <\/p>\n
\n \nAfter 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.” <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n \n \nThe story unfolds in bleak and ravishing beauty (the landscape similar to the endlessness of the steppe in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia<\/i>, 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. <\/p>\n Hiddi goes off the rails and it’s revealed that Gummi is not necessarily the squeaky-clean hero. The tension builds slow … slow … <\/p>\n Rams<\/i> 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 … <\/p>\n It’s specific and it’s also epic. <\/p>\n The silence helps elevate the story into its universal vastness. The style and look of the film (brilliant cinematography by Sturla Brandth Gr\u00f8vlen) 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. <\/p>\n The second the film it ended, it started telescoping out in my mind, getting bigger … and bigger … and bigger … until it was almost unbearable. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gummi (Sigur\u00f0ur Sigurj\u00f3nsson) and Hiddi (Theod\u00f3r J\u00fal\u00edusson) 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 … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n