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Rating: I find it difficult to decide where to start when talking about this film, given the density of symbols it contains that deserve attention. However, I know I want to write about it here and recommend watching it because the film is beautiful and important, rich in moral content, denunciations, and beauty (in the images, in the people, in the human connections described in the story). It also soars above judgment, avoids being pretentious, and stages the real with the believable, offering the viewer a life experience, leaving them alone with their sensitivity and questions.
I found it to be an excellent film from many perspectives: the images, the pacing, the themes, the relevance; there is the moral duty of the individual towards the community; there is the confrontation between responsibility to the collective and responsibility to one's private self; it is both contemporary and timeless; the main actress is Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir, middle-aged, beautiful with discretion and realism, as well as incredibly talented. The production is Franco-Icelandic-Ukrainian, from 2018.
A brief mention of the content and plot: the protagonist is a woman, Halla, who has made it her life's purpose to boycott globalization. Not a small feat, she is a grain of sand against an organized and technological mechanism. This involves many risks, which is why it becomes her sole life purpose. At a certain point, there's a twist: an unexpected private event, totalizing, primordial and of immense human value, shakes her activities but not her moral system. Because she is one of the most tough-serious-motivated women you can see in cinema, a believable hero that Western cinema rarely shows us and, if it can, with some ambiguity. I speak in the masculine not to insist on gender in a discussion that transcends this distinction, but she is female, and this holds value in the context of the film. I won't go into more details; I have been careful so far not to spoil anything, and I won't betray myself like a novice now.
Some plot twists, unlikely but believable and human (not magic or deus-ex-machina!), guide the narrative through unforeseen scenarios up to an unexpected finale. I'll stop here with the detailed account and would like to conclude that in the confrontation between the free individual and the common bourgeois and convenient thought, the individual reveals itself as a fragile element and always loses in the cold outcome of the game. But even lost games enter the epic if they express value and beauty: they end up being remembered and help shape an imaginary. From that moment, when a similar game is played, those references, those values, that example will remain. Being human has a series of implications. This film struck me also because it embodies this.
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