Woman at War

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🎙️ EPISODE 508: 07.12.22 There is a band playing throughout this film. A three-piece dressed an olden day garb: a tuba player, organist and drummer. They play a variation of some gypsy-circus folk hybrid and are occasionally supported by a trio of female singers in even more ancient attire singing even older sounding tunes. They are in the vast and endless Icelandic landscape, plopped like rocks before time. They are in our eco-terrorist protagonist's apartment, stationed like furniture under her Nelson Mandela and Gandhi posters. They are marching down a flooded road in Ukraine. They are everywhere and anywhere. She (Halla) can hear them and so can we. When she goes shopping at an antiqu store for a typewriter on which to pen her manifesto, their song merges with the clack of the printer keys Halla tests out, and it bleeds out into the cacophony of the street when she leaves. She occasionally gives them an uneasy stare and they return the gaze, equally unsure.

Women at War is purposefully playful but never really funny. We are supposed to like Halla, played with a tender restraint Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir (who also plays the role of Buddhist twin sister yin to Halla's yang). The star of the show — as it should be — is the wild and beyond beautiful landscapes of Iceland. They could be anywhere. This could be about anywhere. But this is about Iceland and that certainly helps with the messaging. You would want to destroy the grid for this too...


The film is littered — no (reverse?) pun intended — with outstanding imagery. There's a vivid attention to detail which is thrilling. From Halla's donning a Mandela mask before taking down a drone with a bow and arrow...


...to her wearing the corpse of a dead ram as a disguise to avoid detection by the swarming helicopters...


The inclusion of a "wrong place, wrong time" character, a brown-skinned man who speaks both Spanish and English, always getting arrested in connection to Halla's crimes, was the only thing that felt a little forced. The wonky twist ending might throw people for a loops as well, but I loved it.

Halla wins in the end, but it is a fruitless victory, or at least a half-empty one. The fate of the world still hangs in the balance and it's not looking good. She goes to Ukraine to adopt an orphan girl, and on their way to the airport the bus back breaks down and she has to carry the child through flooded streets, one final warning of what our world is gonna look like, what it looks like now. The band and singers follow with their ancient tunes. The perfect soundtrack for the end, or perhaps a fitting anthem for fixing things, which is to say: to make it look a lot more like the beginning...

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 507 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 509 ⫸

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Woman at War (Kona fer í stríð) is a 2018 Icelandic-Ukrainian comedy-drama film written, produced and directed by Benedikt Erlingsson, and starring Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir. Following a premiere at 2018 Cannes Film Festival via the International Critics' Week, it was released on 22 May 2018 to critical acclaim and selected as the Icelandic entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards ceremony, but it was not nominated.It was released on May 12, 2018.