Jar City | Review

Feted at Karlovy Vary with the top prize of the Grand Prix Crystal Globe and already cemented as a national box office treasure in his native Iceland, Baltasar Kormákur’s anti-climatic, climate-specific tale tinkers into oddball forensic territory. The narrative, a murder mystery template that bizarrely makes associations between ignorant parents who fail to come to the aid of their children and a populations’ true family tree is unfortunately not the ingenious idea that it is thought out to be. Despite the uniqueness of the film, this example of the cookie crumb case simply fails to enthrall the viewer and is nowhere near the solid ground as with another similar set example as Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia.

There are not many films out there where body decomposition has elicited such a knee jerk laugh out loud response – this is just part of the Scandi-humor that is so characteristic of lands where snow and cold weather are a fact of life for half the year. Iceland is a kooky place. It is not a hot spot for murder. It’s geographically thorny. Its inhabitants show signs of wear and tear and isolation apparently has its benefits – at least on the genetic understanding side of things. The lead character (played by (Ingvar E. Sigurdsson) ultimately comes across more like depressed bank teller than a detective. In many ways Jar City is visually colored and atmospherically detailed like the helmer’s previous outing in A Little Trip to Heaven, but here the choice of location is more hostile. Here his native country is dressed with un-postcard-friendly backdrop thus matching the coldness of his cast of characters and applied sense of humor of the film.

Combining a factoid, ancestral study on Iceland with Arnaldur Indridason’s 2000 novel Tainted Blood, Kormákur attempts to merge such stats within a chronologically-twisted detective tale but what is most jarring aren’t the tedious aspects of the case but the emotional layers that examine the generational conflicts of a people and the accompanying overall sense that the same parental mistakes are being repeated over and over.

Stylistically speaking, Kormákur gives this tale an overcoat that perfectly positions the film for an ideal, despairing and desperately looking set up, but looks and atmospherics can only take a narrative so far – the film’s first half hour is a struggle because of it is content in not making heads or tales sense of the slew of clichéd characters, the middle portion is not rasping enough to pose as an eccentric piece of CSI and the grand scheme of the mystery (the discovery of a final resting grounds for one family tree in particular) is un-involving. In the end, Jar City isn’t any better than televisions offerings in the same vein.

2007 Toronto Film Festival September 6th.

Rating 1.5 stars