This film was part of a festival package for me (films based on books), but I delayed it until the last moment, because I read "action" and "conspiracy". I find American action thrillers extremely dull and dumb - I should have guessed that an Icelandic movie based on a renowned crime author would be completely different. It's captivating, refreshing, unpretentious, humorous, and fully rewarding. Anyone who's a fan of big budgets and larger-than-life "realism" would feel cheated - which already makes me chuckle. I'm glad this author has been filmed, and I'll look forward to both his books and more adaptations.
Reviews
2 Reviews
Beautiful Helen
(2022)
Contemplative, dialectical, enthralling spiral
20 April 2023
This film is admittedly its author's self-reflection: he has intimated he went through a personal crisis and needed things out of his system, hence creating his first dialogue-based film. It was interesting to read he's still uncertain about the result, having been hesitant to share it with the public. This of course attests to an utmost creative sincerity. Furthermore, he says the process didn't relieve the anxiety: the stuff of art with catharsis always in sight... or in secret.
In a hypothetical second installment, the storyteller coiuld even be Tamar - the "fatale" female antagonist who seems to frighten the protagonist Gabo, so much so that he invents this "Beautiful Helen" to escapes with in a story within stories. In one of these interwoven stories a Helen is Gabo's wife, Tamar being his wife in "reality". Gabo has mysteriously taken his own life, despite the fact he and Helen had an "ideal love". Towards the end of the film Tamar accuses Helen of having killed Gabo, whom she "did not deserve".
This all may manifest Gabo's romantic need to be loved in a way no lesser than giving life meaning, despite Helen's logical attempts to dissuade him: a love he doesn't feel he deserves, both creating an escapist "ideal", and the ideal being flawed (not a common perception of beauty). He can neither perfectly idealise, nor can he face the subconscious passion that binds him with the strikingly attractive-repelling Tamar, mirrored in Gabo's self-combat.
Does an ideal exist? Does Eros which leads the hero on a pathless journey fail or succeed? Is ideal love realised in death, or does Helen's imperfection refer back to life with its insufferable emotional content? Is Tamar the overwleming force of life on course to deconstruct Helen's eschatology, telling her to "just shut up" in a relentless monologue? Is this the voice of Gabo on whose behalf she speaks? Does he "escape" in self-rejuvenation by letting Helen the heroine go, while the final meta-narrative leaves him face-to-face with a "real" Helen who asks, "What about us"? The viewer is served an irresistable invitation of self-interpretation.
In the Georgian classic Repentance an old woman asked, "What good is a road if it doesn't lead to the temple?" In Beautiful Helen, the temple is a tree.
The filmmaker: "In "Beautiful Helen" the questions went really deep. (...) But if I have to point to a moment which I like more in my film, it's probably that one part without words - the scene next to the tree, basically the scene without dialogue."
The Poet is always ambiguous: "I'll be waiting here... for your silence to break, for your soul to shake, for your love to wake!" "You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you - but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art." Rumi "A man once asked Rumi, 'Why is it you talk so much about silence?' His answer: 'The radiant one inside me has never said a word.'"
In a hypothetical second installment, the storyteller coiuld even be Tamar - the "fatale" female antagonist who seems to frighten the protagonist Gabo, so much so that he invents this "Beautiful Helen" to escapes with in a story within stories. In one of these interwoven stories a Helen is Gabo's wife, Tamar being his wife in "reality". Gabo has mysteriously taken his own life, despite the fact he and Helen had an "ideal love". Towards the end of the film Tamar accuses Helen of having killed Gabo, whom she "did not deserve".
This all may manifest Gabo's romantic need to be loved in a way no lesser than giving life meaning, despite Helen's logical attempts to dissuade him: a love he doesn't feel he deserves, both creating an escapist "ideal", and the ideal being flawed (not a common perception of beauty). He can neither perfectly idealise, nor can he face the subconscious passion that binds him with the strikingly attractive-repelling Tamar, mirrored in Gabo's self-combat.
Does an ideal exist? Does Eros which leads the hero on a pathless journey fail or succeed? Is ideal love realised in death, or does Helen's imperfection refer back to life with its insufferable emotional content? Is Tamar the overwleming force of life on course to deconstruct Helen's eschatology, telling her to "just shut up" in a relentless monologue? Is this the voice of Gabo on whose behalf she speaks? Does he "escape" in self-rejuvenation by letting Helen the heroine go, while the final meta-narrative leaves him face-to-face with a "real" Helen who asks, "What about us"? The viewer is served an irresistable invitation of self-interpretation.
In the Georgian classic Repentance an old woman asked, "What good is a road if it doesn't lead to the temple?" In Beautiful Helen, the temple is a tree.
The filmmaker: "In "Beautiful Helen" the questions went really deep. (...) But if I have to point to a moment which I like more in my film, it's probably that one part without words - the scene next to the tree, basically the scene without dialogue."
The Poet is always ambiguous: "I'll be waiting here... for your silence to break, for your soul to shake, for your love to wake!" "You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you - but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art." Rumi "A man once asked Rumi, 'Why is it you talk so much about silence?' His answer: 'The radiant one inside me has never said a word.'"
Tell Your Friends