Scandanavian crime writing may have been initiated by Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow but it’s now a complete industry from the phenomenally successful Henning Mankell through to Ake Edwardson, Arnaldur Indridason and others. Indridason’s novel Jar City has now been in adapted for the cinema by the director Baltasar Kormakur. Kormakur had some success with his first film 101 Reykavik and was tempted to Hollywood for his second, the somewhat less successful A Little Trip to Heaven.
Kormakur has returned to his roots in a big way with Jar City because this film possesses not a scintilla of Hollywood veneer. The director seems to have got hold of the oldest film stock in Iceland and when he does sweep out over the landscape it is to show the country at its bleakest and most windswept.
Nothing could be less like Hollywood than the ‘hero’, Erlendur, a police inspector with a dodgy line in Fairisle sweaters, a beard that looks inhabited and a penchant for sheep’s head takeaways. Icelandic cuisine is famed for such delicacies as rotted shark, and Erlendur tucks into his sheep’s head while studying police files, plucking out the eye with particular relish. When Erlendur’s deputy asks if there is anything vegetarian in a café, the barman replies, ‘We don’t serve any of that guacamole shit, here’. Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson plays Erlendur with a hangdog passivity that masks a steely determination to do the right thing. This involves him in negotiations with his daughter Eva (Agusta Eva Erlendsdottir) who may or may not be a drug addict, but who spends far too much time with the kind of people her father should be locking up.
Jar City is a police-procedural in which Erlendur investigates the murder of a seedy paedophile suspect, who has got mixed up with even seedier side kicks. Erlendur’s deputy remarks at one stage ‘It’s a typical Icelandic murder. Messy and pointless’. It involves Erlendur in the pursuit of a cold case, triggered by the finding of the photograph of an isolated gravestone in a drawer in the victim’s flat. At the same time, a business man, Orn, played by Atli Rain Sigurdsson, is ploughing through genetic records looking for connections to the death of his five-year-old daughter.
Kormakur has constructed a film which won’t win any awards from the Iceland tourist board. Everything is rundown. Erlendur lives in a dilapidated high rise and drives an old Range Rover. A chase takes place over marsh, scrub and pitted country roads. When a body is disinterred from beneath the rotting concrete floor of a flat that has stunk for years, the audience have been holding their noses, and their stomachs, from the moment the drills are taken out of the van. Jar City is a film of real moral and emotional weight, that treats life’s small victims, their narrow lives, and messy tragedies seriously but never drily.