Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch 101 Reykjavik
2000 · Baltasar Kormákur · 101 Reykjavik on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the low winter sun and long blue dusks throughout. (light)
Steuger builds the whole atmosphere from Reykjavík's wintry light, neon and sodium glow against snow and wet pavement, interiors close and lamplit.
Payoff: The city's own light seems to be keeping Hlynur exactly where he is.
Listen for the score's mix of British art pop and Icelandic edge. (sound)
Damon Albarn and Einar Örn Benediktsson score the film together, giving it a melancholy, modern pulse that runs under the deadpan voiceover.
Payoff: The music carries feeling the narration keeps trying to laugh off.
Notice how similar Hlynur's days look, bar, bed, and home. (structure)
The film compresses his repetitive routine into a loop, cutting on his ironic voiceover rather than on plot, so the days start to blur together.
Payoff: The looping rhythm makes his inertia something you feel, not just something he describes.
Watch how little Hlynur actually does in any given scene. (performance)
Guðnason plays him as watchable while doing almost nothing, letting irony sit on top of something closer to depression.
Payoff: His passivity is the whole performance, and it stays funny and sad at once.
Notice how crowded and charged the small apartment feels. (staging)
Mother, son, and the new houseguest Lola are staged in the same tight kitchen, sofa, and hallway spaces again and again.
Payoff: Ordinary domestic closeness starts to feel loaded before anything is said.
Once you have seen it
Watch Hlynur floating alone in the arctic water fantasy. (camera)
The fantasy insert shows him adrift, face up, going nowhere, while the water does all the moving around him.
Payoff: For one image his passivity stops being a joke and becomes almost beautiful. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the figure goes still and the world carries him instead.
Notice that Hlynur never actually leaves the 101 postal code. (structure)
The same streets and harbor keep recurring throughout the film, a closed circuit rather than a real journey outward.
Payoff: His drift only looks like motion; the city never lets him actually go anywhere. In the reading: voyage-balade form. The reading calls this a voyage-balade: a stroll through space that never adds up to an actual journey.
Watch how decisively Lola acts against Hlynur's constant drift. (performance)
Abril plays her with appetite and certainty, deciding and acting throughout, a contrast the film keeps placing directly against his passivity.
Payoff: She is doing the one thing he never manages: actually choosing something.
Carry this in: Watch how rarely Hlynur does anything, and notice how completely the film makes that watchable.