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WOMAN AT WAR
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The Icelandic actor-turned-director Benedikt Erlingsson achieved cult status with his tremendous 2013 film Of Horses and Men, in which horses were the facilitators and objects of passionate human love. Now he comes to the Critics Week sidebar of Cannes with this well-turned, well-tuned oddity, that brings Erlingsson’s career as a feature director to its Difficult Second Album moment. It is confidently and rather stylishly made, with the same eccentric poise that distinguished his equine success, and the same sweeping sense of landscape. There is a very good performance from Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir as Halla, a fortysomething choir conductor. Erlingsson shows a great flair for ideas, scenes, tableaux. But is it all encumbered with quirkiness? Is the quirk-imperative something that weighs it down?
What Woman at War has above all is a terrific premise; and by that token, a terrific opening scene. Halla is a secret guerrilla eco-activist who is campaigning against the energy corporations that are moving into Iceland. To protest, she sneaks out into the countryside and sabotages electricity pylons in remote areas – the hated pylons that are despoiling the landscape – using cordless circular saws to slice through the girders, and a bow-and-arrow to shoot disruptive cables over the power lines. (These scenes are not unlike those in Of Horses and Men where barbed-wire fences are cut in the course of a neighbours’ dispute.)
Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian)
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