101 Reykjavik · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

There's a moment when Hlynur pictures himself floating in arctic water — face up, going nowhere, the cold holding him like a hand. It's a fantasy insert, a literalization, and it tells you everything about how this film moves. Or rather, about how it doesn't. A man drifts in freezing water. The water has all the motion. He has none. Keep that image. It's the whole film in one frame, and it's the place where Deleuze becomes useful, because Deleuze spent two books describing exactly this: the moment cinema stopped being about people who act and started being about people who can only watch what happens to them.

Think about what we expect from a movie. Someone perceives a problem and does something about it; the doing changes the situation; the next thing follows from the last. Deleuze calls that whole well-oiled chain the movement-image — perception leading to action leading to a changed world, the cut quietly serving the link. It's the grammar of almost every film you've seen. Hlynur cannot speak it. He perceives plenty — he narrates constantly, ironic, deadpan, self-cancelling — but the perception never discharges into an act that matters. His mother's friend Lola moves in. He sleeps with her on New Year's. She turns out to be his mother's lover, and pregnant by him. Any other protagonist would be forced into motion. Hlynur just keeps narrating, because narration is the one thing that costs him nothing. This is what Deleuze named the crisis of the action-image: a character who can no longer react adequately to what he perceives. The sensory-motor circuit — see, then do — has gone slack. The situation is enormous; the response is a shrug and a voiceover.

Out of that slackness, a new kind of image. When a character can only look and listen, with no action available to resolve what's in front of him, Deleuze calls the result a pure optical and sound situation — an opsign, a sonsign. The bar, the television, the early-internet porn glowing in the dark room: these aren't settings Hlynur acts within, they're situations he absorbs. He becomes what Deleuze calls a seer, a voyant — a watcher and endurer rather than an agent. The film's first-person construction makes this literal. We are sealed inside the consciousness of someone whose defining trait is that he registers everything and converts none of it into movement. The irony in the voiceover is the sound of a man watching his own life as though it were on the screens he stares at.

And the days loop. Bar, bed, mother's living room, repeat, the editing compressing the repetition into stasis, the structure circling the turning of a Reykjavík year. Deleuze had a name for the trip that transforms nothing — the voyage-balade, the stroll, the form where a character moves through space without any of it adding up to a journey. Hlynur never even leaves the 101 postal code; the city is shot as a closed circuit, the same streets and harbor framed to feel inescapable. His drift is a balade with the travel removed. What fills the loops is dead time, temps mort — stretches where the everyday is simply held, nothing advancing. Most films cut dead time out. This one is made of it, and that's the point: you can't feel a wasted life if the film keeps rescuing you from the boredom of it.

But there's a darker current than mere stasis, and it's where the film earns its coldness. Underneath the slacker comedy runs a downward slope — the masturbation, the unemployment, the drinking, and at the bottom of it a flirtation with self-erasure. Deleuze, borrowing from Zola, called this the impulse-image: a world of raw drives, appetite and compulsion erupting beneath the social surface, pulling everything along a line of slope toward exhaustion and death. Hlynur's porn-and-pub circuit isn't just lazy; it's symptomatic, an appetite that degrades. The arctic-water fantasy is where the impulse and the seer meet — and where Deleuze offers the most beautiful name for it. The space is an any-space-whatever, an espace quelconque: not Reykjavík, not anywhere, just an emptied affective field of white water and cold light, a place drained of any function as a setting. And in it occurs what Deleuze called the movement of world — the figure goes still while the world moves around him, the way a dancer can be carried by a dance he's no longer driving. Hlynur stops. The arctic moves. His passivity becomes, for one image, almost sublime.

Why reach for Deleuze at all for what looks like a Nordic sex farce? Because the alternative is to call Hlynur a loser and move on, and the film is plainly after something the word "loser" can't hold. The Deleuzian frame says his inertia isn't a character flaw to be fixed by act three; it's a whole mode of being that cinema spent the postwar decades learning to film. Place it in the lineage and you can see the craft debt exactly. From The Graduate it takes the passive young man becalmed by an older woman, with pop songs — the Kinks' "Lola," reborn by the casting — doing the narrating his will won't. From Trainspotting and Annie Hall it takes the ironic first-person voiceover laid over needle-drops, the confession as architecture. From Slacker it takes the radical proposition that arrested drift is a legitimate subject, plot-resistance a form. From Festen and Dogme it takes the claustrophobic family chamber, the apartment as a triangle that should be ordinary and is charged instead. And Victoria Abril carries Almodóvar in her body — the transgressive erotic heat of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! imported whole, southern appetite crashing into a sealed northern room. Lola is the action-image walking into a film that has lost the capacity for one. She acts. She decides. She is pregnant and adult and certain. Around her, Hlynur watches.

That's the film's real achievement, and what Deleuze helps you see: it gives the time-image a comic body. The seer is usually a melancholy figure in a Bergman or Antonioni frame. Here he's funny, and the comedy is the anesthetic over the depression, the two held in one frame without either winning. Watch it again for the water. Watch how rarely Hlynur does anything, and how completely the film is built to make that watchable. Then notice that you've been doing exactly what he does — looking, absorbing, unable to make him move — and that the film knew it all along.