I thought it might be nice to watch a winter, Christmas or Arctic-related film or TV show as part of the 12 Days of Christmas but there’s nothing particularly new at the moment. Was it two years ago now that Iceland appeared on about six TV shows in three days? Not finding that this year. What happened to all the travel shows, all the cooking shows, all the TV production companies that send people to find out about Christmas in the snow? So, I’m going to watch Light Attaching to a Girl, which I found on Amazon Prime. It looks like a fairly small, fairly low-budget independent film about a girl who runs away to Iceland to find herself, escaping an overbearing father and two sisters who hog all the family attention. Solo female travel, good. Iceland, good. Find herself… not so sure about this bit.
Ok, it was everything I expected it to be. I won’t show you the notes I made as I watched it but at least three times I wailed “this is going to be Eat Pray Love all over again!”. I watched that with a friend, her sister and the sister’s friends when it was in the cinema. They all came out exclaiming about how amazing it was while I was thinking “that was the biggest waste of time since Brokeback Mountain” and I was so happy when years later, my friend said that she’d felt the same. “I don’t know how to be!” just haunts me. This is similar. Eighteen-year-old American girl, bored and purposeless, goes off to Iceland and… does nothing in particular except mope, with an utterly blank and vacant face for forty minutes. Clare is the living embodiment of Billie Eilish’s face. Let me explain that. Billie Eilish, if you watch videos and interviews with her, is lively and enthusiastic and intelligent but her face very easily looks bored and like she’s been forcibly sedated. I wrote down “Billie Eilish’s face made voice” but it’s not just Clare’s voice, it’s her entire being.
Iceland is so beautiful and this film does take you to a good number of scenic places but it also seems to put a sort of grey filter over it that makes everything look dull and dim and made me question several times whether it was supposed to be set a couple of decades ago. Isn’t this supposed to be a kind of coming-of-age, rite-of-passage, spiritual awakening kind of movie? I know Iceland is hardly Caribbean sunshine but you’re making everything look so grey and miserable. Turn the saturation up if that’s what you need to counter its natural northern not-sunniness. Use its natural beauty to your full advantage! Let’s see Clare find herself!
Clare, aged 18, works washing dishes at a restaurant or cafe and then she comes home and her father expects her and her sisters to look after the house. You start wondering if he’s controlling or borderline abusive but as the film goes on, you gradually realise that the mother, his wife, is dead, and he’s simply a manchild who’s used to having a clean and well-run house but has never done it himself, has no idea what to do and therefore passes the job onto the surviving women of the house. The sisters, described in the film’s blurb as taking all the attention, are no worse than Clare herself. They’re just three young women with mundane lives who hang out with friends and listen to music and drink too much at parties. The blurb definitely makes this sound like a bit of a Cinderella experience and it’s not. These are not the ugly stepsisters, they’re not treading Clare down, they just… exist in her life. They hang out, they laugh, they poke at each other. They’re hardly the nemeses the blurb hints at them being.
Anyway, Clare decides to go to Iceland. I don’t think we ever see what makes her make the decision to go somewhere, let along specifically to Iceland. Her dad doesn’t want her to go – this is a bit “you’re 18 and I own you and I say you can’t leave the house” but she goes. We know this is the first time she’s left the country because we see her having the passport photos taken. I know it’s more and more popular to have them done at a studio as the requirements get tighter and tighter but a photo machine in the corner of the supermarket is still how I think of passport photos being done, so it took a moment to realise why she seemed to be having a photoshoot. Ah, passport photos. First passport, first time leaving small town America.
We cut straight from the plane to Jökulsárlón (six hours on the bus if you don’t make any stops at all, and no tours run from the airport, they run from Reykjavik) and this is the point where I really started to wonder when this was set. We’d seen Clare pack an old-fashioned powder-blue suitcase, the sort people used in the 60s and the colour palette of the film made me wonder if I just hadn’t noticed this was supposed to be the 60s. Now she produces a disposable film camera. 90s? Or is she like me, and she just likes shooting film? Oh yes, she asks someone to take a photo of her and has to tell her how the camera works. Later, she goes to Whales of Iceland which narrows it down to the modern day, as Whales opened in 2015.
You see her at Jökulsárlón, at Kerið crater (where she yells “is there anyone out there??” despite the fact that you can see people on the crater rim opposite), pays at the Kerið kiosk to enter Seljalandsfoss, eats ice cream from a large basalt-decorated city deli at Geysir out in the countryside, plays in the sand at Reynisfjara (“I went to the black sand beach” because no one knows the real name of any of these places) and paddles at Fjaðrárgljúfur while playing the ukulele. We see her buying pastries in Reykjavik, wandering around Hallgrimskirkja and getting drunk in a couple of bars. None of this makes Iceland look pretty. None of it makes it look appealing. None of it makes Clare look like she’s enjoying herself. None of it makes it look like she’s having that personal revelation of “finding herself”. I just wanted to reach through the screen and slap some life into her!
The only times she opens her mouth in any of the Iceland sequences are to talk about how special and unusual she is to travel by herself (I know, it feels like it if you’ve never done it before but it’s really not), to go on and on in full tourist voice about whether the Icelanders she’s drinking with watch American TV (everyone walks away within five minutes and this seems to surprise her), to realise she can’t pay an entry fee in US dollars and to ask what bread is. I keep having to say “she’s 18, she’s a child, she’s ignorant, let her off” and I could, if I felt like there was anything coming off this kid. If I felt like she was growing and learning or doing anything other than being bored, I could forgive her. I want to see development and it’s just not there. This is your classic eight-year-old at a museum, trailing after parents, no interest in anything, bored out of her mind and yet it’s an 18-year-old out in the world, in a beautiful part of the world, for the first time and it’s really annoying!
We cut back and forth between Iceland and Clare’s childhood. Her sisters choosing between smores and red velvet cakes is apparently a major, possibly traumatic, memory although honestly, I couldn’t quite figure out whether she was the one who wanted all three of them to have matching cakes or whether she was the one who wanted to be different but couldn’t quite do it. Either fits her non-existent personality, really. There’s a line of kids going to their first communion in little white dresses and veils while she’s in Hallgrimskirkja. You feel the whole time like you’re waiting for her memory to hit the big thing, the thing she doesn’t know she’s been repressing all her life and it does build up to a suggestion that her mother is dead but that’s it. In various memories, the mother yells about “I’m not putting my body through that!” but you never see what that is or what the outcome is. Whales of Iceland are placed as the trigger for Clare remembering her mother pregnant – because pregnant = fat = whale – or possibly she’s imagining her mother pregnant with her, because you see her holding a baby and “Infant Clare” is credited at the end. It just feels like nothing really happens in the entire film. Clare goes to Iceland and then, having achieved nothing, felt nothing, realised nothing, she comes home.
The only time Clare seems to crack a smile in the entire film is when she’s on the plane on the way home. She’s badly dyed her hair pink in the tiniest sink in Reykjavik and seems pleased with it. We see a few shots of someone with vivid pink hair in her childhood memories who we assume is the mother but every time we explicitly see the mother, she has plain brown hair. The only hint at what actually happened to the mother is a couple of shots of red hair dye running over Clare’s arms and wrists as she rinses the colour out of her hair and even then, I might be reading too much into it.
Clare just seems bored and mopy. She doesn’t come across as someone processing trauma or finding herself or escaping her humdrum life. She just comes across as someone who has so little going on in her life that she can’t find any interest in anything, not even in being in Iceland. It’s just somewhere else to wander vacantly around. At least Elizabeth summons up some enthusiasm occasionally in Eat Pray Love. I might even let it go if there was any explanation as to why she’s so vacant and has so little interest in anything, if it was a plot point but it’s not. She’s not escaping her life, she’s living exactly the same life but with a different backdrop that she’s still not looking at.
I began to think about what I’d like a solo travel film set in Iceland to look like. I want more joy. I want more enthusiasm. I want less navel-gazing. I want less “I’m not like other girls”. I want more adventure. I began to wonder about writing a script and then a storyboard and then recruiting a friend to come to Iceland to help film it. And then I realised if I’m going to do something like that, it’s going to be in the form of a book. I don’t write fiction so it’ll never happen but it’s still more likely than me making a whole actual film.
Do I recommend it? It seems to be an independent film, on a very small budget. Clare, her sisters, her dad, Infant Clare and Uncle At Party are all played by people with the same surname, who I assume are real sisters, father, uncle and someone’s baby, people with the same surname as the writer-director, who I assume is the real-life mum/wife. There are four Icelandic actors credited and I bet at least two of them are actually real bakery employees who got filmed at work. It’s a small in-house production and I don’t want to criticise it to the moon and back. It’s well-made, I’ll give it that. It looks good, although its colour palette is so far from my taste, and so far from what I think would work for the film I wanted this to be.
If you’re into sad girl movies that hint at death and depression and existential angst, you might be into it. It reminds me a lot of some of the films I saw at the local arts centre a few years ago when I watched a handful of the 2012 Best Picture Oscar nominees – they’re arty, they’re serious or sad, they’re not meant to be fun popcorn films. Amour, Ginger & Rosa, Beasts of the Southern Wild, it fits in well with that sort of thing. But it’s not my thing. I’m a Mission: Impossible fan, so these quiet films where not much really happens just don’t work for me. That’s down to me being the wrong audience for it, rather than there being anything implictly wrong with the film itself. It’s not you, it’s me.
No, I personally won’t watch it again. I want to see more joy, I want to see more plot, I want to see more life. I want to see Iceland used to better effect. But I’m glad to have added another Iceland movie to my repertoire.