white_hart

Woman at War is an Icelandic comedy in the same dark vein as Rams and Under the Tree. It centres on Halla, a middle-aged choir director who leads a secret double life as "The Mountain Woman", an eco-terrorist focused on disrupting industrial production with the aim of discouraging foreign industrial investment. Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir plays a double lead as Halla, alternating cycling through Reykjavík, conducting choir rehearsals and discussing adopting a Ukrainian orphan with running across mountains, toppling electricity pylons and evading pursuit inside a glacier, and her twin sister Àsa, a hippieish yoga teacher. I have to say that, for me, one of the great delights of this film was seeing so much screen time given to a woman in her 40s who spends a lot of the time in a lopapeysa and hiking boots and who, when depicted changing after swimming, is pulling on sensible big pants, though the Icelandic scenery is also stunning and, appropriately given the eco-conscious message of the film, is allowed to play a starring role. Director Benedikt Erlingsson doesn't allow the humour of the film to get in the way of ramping up the tension as the forces of law and order close in on Halla, and presents an absorbing portrait of an Iceland that isn't quite the liberal paradise many of us like to think it is (apart from the government's pandering to foreign industrial investors and the liberal use of roadblocks and surveillance to track down the saboteur, the hapless black tourist who keeps being arrested on suspicion with very litte evidence makes a serious point underneath the comedy). The cinematography is fantastic, and while the device of having the soundtrack performed by on-screen musicians seemed rather odd at first (especially as their first appearance is on a remote moss-covered mountainside) but actually worked really well (and I liked the music a lot too).