Pros: This space is too tiny for me to list all the superlatives
Cons: The first 15 minutes are murky and confusing
The Bottom Line: More than just the "best Eskimo movie ever made," this is a film which transcends time, place and culture. Quite possibly the best movie of the year.
A naked man runs across a barren arctic landscape of ice and water, his feet bloodied and his body wracked with hypothermia. Behind him, three men, bent on revenge, chase him with spears made from animal bones.
This is the thrilling pivot point of the three-hour Inuit-language film Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner).
We see the naked runner’s feet galloping across the ice. We hear the crunch of snow under his pursuers’ sealskin boots. We all but feel the cold sting of air in our lungs.
As the runner reaches a stretch of open water on the ice pack, he seems to glide right across with hardly a ripple. It’s a miracle; and so is the film, Atanarjuat.
The movie is one of those film-going experiences which make viewers go weak with joy and leaves them walking rubber-legged out of the theater after three hours. It’s one of those movies with which you instantly claim a special intimacy and go around urging everyone you encounter—friends, family, strangers—to stop what they’re doing and make immediate plans to see Atanarjuat. This is the kind of film for which superlatives were created. If I were the kind of person given to cliché, I probably would have started this review with “If you see only one film this year…”
In short, Atanarjuat is so good it makes me incoherent.
Co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada, Atanarjuat was made with an all-Inuit cast and a technical crew which was nearly all Inuit. Shot on location near the present-day Northwest Territories community of Igloolik, the movie is as rich with landscape and people as it is a dramatic story.
The film is based on an ancient legend and set “at the dawn of the first millennium” (according to press materials)—but the saga is as universal and timeless as you can get. Atanarjuat opens with its weakest 15 minutes in a prologue where we see how evil, in the form of a stranger, divides the tiny, close-knit community of seal hunters. It’s hard to sort out the characters—especially when we first meet them in the interior of an igloo dimly lit by seal oil lamps—but it’s the atmosphere of foreboding which is most important. This opening sequence focuses on Tulimaq, a hunter who is having a run of bad luck. His knife breaks on a rock, he’s taunted by his fellow hunters (“Maybe your wife would make a better hunter!”) and he’s forced to feed his family the butt end of the seal from the communal feast. When his wife Pittaluk says, “I’m getting sick of eating leftovers,” it could be the complaint of many a blue-collar housewife living on the cusp of poverty in modern America.
And this is one of Atanarjuat’s strongest qualities: at nearly every point, we can identify with its characters—no matter if they’re eating raw walrus hearts or making sleds out of caribou antlers and sinew. Director Zacharias Kunuk and writer Paul Apak Angilirq have created a story which transcends time and place and goes right to our very souls as we’re sitting out there in the dark theaters or living rooms of this shiny, convenient 21st century. It is impossible to watch Atanarjuat and remain unmoved by its characters.
The movie really picks up speed and clarity when it jumps forward twenty years as Tulimaq’s sons, Amaqjuaq (Pakkak Innukshuk) and Atanarjuat (Natar Ungalaaq), are engaged in a bitter rivalry with the village hothead, Oki (Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq). Atanarjuat has eyes for the demure beauty Atuat (Sylvia Ivalu), but she has already been promised, in a paternal pre-nuptial arrangement, to Oki. The two men square off in a community boxing match, simply called “punching heads,” and Atanarjuat emerges the victor. This, of course, doesn’t sit well with Oki and evil festers in his heart. Meanwhile, Oki’s sister Puja (Lucy Tulugarjuk), a coquettish flirt, also vies for Atanarjuat’s affection.
This is The Godfather of Eskimo films, the Hamlet of Inuit. Emotions run high, jealousy runs its course, and eventually we get to the point where a naked Atanarjuat is running for his life across the tundra.
It’s a big, epic tale told against a vast landscape of snow and ice. And yet, it’s an extremely intimate film experience—helped, in part, by the small, mostly amateur cast and a detailed-filled production. Much care has been taken to get all the costumes and props as authentic as anything you’ll see in a film about ancient civilization.
Because Atanarjuat was made almost entirely by Inuit actors and technicians, there’s an extra resonance to the way the story is presented to us. While Hollywood has previously done a fair-to-middling job of examining Eskimo culture—most notably in films like Map of the Human Heart (1992) and The White Dawn (1974)—we are always reminded that it is an Anglo view of a world which few of us can even properly grasp. When I watch Map of the Human Heart I never forget that I’m seeing it through the lens of an outsider looking in. Atanarjuat, on the other hand, doesn’t douse us with a condescending tale of “poor, ignorant, unchurched savages” or a dry, authoritative National Geographic documentary. Instead, it places us intimately inside a world where life or death hinges on a broken knife, a lame sled dog or a naked sub-zero sprint. Atanarjuat merely has a timeless story to tell of love, revenge, murder, betrayal and forgiveness. Put Shakespeare in a sealskin parka, threaten him with frostbite and he’d probably deliver something close to this. Yes, even the barefoot chase on ice.
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