Innocence doesn’t just end, it is dashed on the jagged rocks of experience at the end of a torpid Icelandic summer in Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson‘s beautifully observed, though overlong coming-of-age tale. Less a structured story than a series of fleeting impressions, it is told not through dialogue or exposition, but through ephemeral, sensuous details — long hair whipped by gusts of wind, sunlight trapped in the peach fuzz of a cheek, droplets of sweat beading the nape of a neck, fingers beginning to prune in spring water. And that gives this remarkably assured debut, in which two best friends in an isolated coastal community experience the pain and euphoria of awakening sexuality, its immersive sense of immediacy. Picking up the Queer Lion in Venice and at this early stage leading the field for the Audience Award here at the Transilvania International Film Festival, it’s like Jordan Vogt-Roberts‘ “Kings of Summer” or Andrew Cividino‘s “Sleeping Giant” refracted through the hazy rush-roar of Andrea Arnold’s “American Honey,” entirely alive with the exquisite uncertainty of youth, in all its joy, misery and mortification.
Shame is certainly one of the basic drivers for Thor (Baldur Einarsson) a snub-nosed 14-year old so embarrassed by his lack of pubic hair that he’s shown early on fashioning himself a makeshift merkin from the stray hairs off a hairbrush. He has a crush on local girl Beta (Dilja Valsdotttir) and his best friend Kristján (Blær Hinriksson) resolves to help set the pair up. But the glowingly golden Kristján has feelings for Thor that go well beyond the best friend/wingman role he tries to play, and this is not acceptable in this tiny, marginalized coastal village where repression and a kind of curtain-twitching conformity is the norm. It’s not just homophobia that is rampant: all of the female characters are at one point or another called “sluts” or “whores,” and there’s a paranoiac distrust of outsiders such that when Thor’s mother takes up with Swedish expat farmer Sven (Søren Malling), Thor’s belligerently, maliciously teenaged sister Rakel lashes out at her for jeopardizing the family’s already tenuous standing within the community.
The luxuriant 129-minute length gives Guðmundsson ample time to sketch other characters, such as Thor’s other, more artistic sister who has a propensity for reading out poetry at the breakfast table and painting blatantly homoerotic portraits of her brother and his best friend. Then there’s Kristján’s abusive father, who despite, or possibly because of, his hard-drinking, violent tendencies, seems a fairly acceptable model of manhood in these parts. And a gang of local bullies hovers on the periphery of Thor’s life too, which unfolds, like childhood summers do, in fits and starts of high drama, with long periods of repetition and idleness in between. The slumber parties, camping trips, fishing expeditions and visits to the local diner all become just markers in time of yet another summer until it becomes impossible to ignore that this is not yet another summer. It’s the last of its kind.
The pacing might frustrate the less patient viewer, but the wonderful photography from rising cinematography star Sturla Brandth Grøvlen (“Victoria,” “Rams,” “Shelley“) is never less than compelling, negotiating the enormous scale differential between the wides of Iceland’s lakes and cliffs and the macro close-ups of eyelashes or hesitant hand-holding with breathtaking ease. And the two young leads are rivetingly natural in roles that require not just commitment to their own characters but also to the recognizable chemistry of conflict and communion that exists between them. So, while the setting is exotic, the stew of sexual confusion, curiosity, and apprehension that bubbles like a hot spring underneath it all, feels eminently relatable.
The landscapes are of the harsh, rugged kind and there is casual cruelty amid the crags and cairns. Chickens are ruthlessly plucked, fish are pulled from the sea and brained on fenceposts, gored rams are roughly subdued and mercy-killed with matter-of-fact efficiency. It’s an environment reflected more in Thor’s scampish earthiness than Kristján’s almost pre-Raphaelite beauty, which might seem like an irrelevant detail except that “Heartstone” is deeply, though never pruriently, interested in physicality, in the growing, aching awareness of one’s own body and that of others, of the powerful attraction that touches, glances and glimpses can exert.
It might seem unbalanced, the way in its later stages it focuses on Thor’s experiences and lets Kristján’s more overtly dramatic arc of change recede into the background somewhat. But even that feels like a calculated move on Guðmundsson’s part. As much as this is a coming-of-age portrait, it is also the story of a community, and of Community as a (negative) concept: the way it defines itself against otherness. In a coda that could seem too on the nose if it were leaned on even a little more, a young boy throws a useless fish back into the ocean, in direct contrast to the opening scenes in which Thor and his friends, Kristján included, stamp a bullrout to death, for no other reason than its ugliness.
That instance of pointless, boyish, peer-pressure cruelty comes to stand for the way the community, as tight and disapproving as a pursed mouth, reacts to anything outside its traditions. And though Thor’s own passage into adulthood is hardly smooth sailing, there is a sense in which, in his relative ordinariness he represents the little town, while Kristján’s horizons are actually much broader and braver, if he can just raise his eyes to see them. Beautifully shot, touchingly performed and delivered with a thrillingly atmospheric sense of place, “Heartstone” lets us meditate on these themes during that long last summer, when childhood seems like it’s going to extend, agonizingly, forever, only for it to be snapped abruptly away like a shout on the wind. [B+]