Smilla’s Sense of Snow
With Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, Richard Harris, Robert Loggia, Vanessa Redgrave, Jim Broadbent, Peter Capaldi, Emma Croft, and Mario Adorf.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
By the 50s, when paranoia about the atomic bomb and cold war fantasies about alien infiltration took over the conspiracy thriller, a sense of government bureaucracy became more important to the genre. In later decades this feature was succeeded by–or equated with–the influence of corporations and then multicorporations. But however well these movies conjure up the poetry of menace, they usually falter once the plot is finally unraveled. (For a classic example, watch the closing minutes of the 1965 Gregory Peck thriller Mirage.) The closer the hero or heroine comes to discovering the roots of a pervasive evil, the more pressure there is on the filmmakers to go beyond–or at least not disappoint–the viewer’s lurid imaginings. All too frequently such movies end with a ludicrous scene in which the protagonist, by virtue of discovering the truth, has to die at the hands of some hokey villain, who instead of killing him or her without delay launches into a laborious explanation of whatever the filmmakers haven’t succeeded in conveying up to this point–after which the villain perishes in some apocalyptic conflagration and the protagonist is improbably set free.
This is more or less what happens in Smilla’s Sense of Snow, a star-studded thriller set in Copenhagen and Greenland, adapted by Ann Biderman from a popular novel by Peter Hoeg and directed by Bille August. The less we know about the half-Greenlandic Inuit, half-American heroine Smilla Jaspersen (Julia Ormond) and about the death of her six-year-old neighbor, an Inuit boy from Greenland, the more gripped we’re likely to be. Similarly, the closer she comes to the truth, the more ready we are to make a beeline for the exit. The film runs for a full two hours, but it’s mostly the first hour that feels fresh and electric; after that, what feels vast–apart from some nicely filmed Greenland settings in ‘Scope–is the conspiracy-thriller machinery grinding to a stop.
Even more important, Paris Belongs to Us, the first feature of a film critic, offers a critical and philosophical commentary on the conspiracy thriller itself–a fascinating account of its allures and its dangers. In fact, Rivette’s principal point about conspiracy theories is that they are alluring, to the audience as well as the characters. The satisfactions of coherence they offer are so compelling that even the potential or apparent victims of such conspiracies can’t resist imagining them (a paranoid vision with ties to Kafka). But rather than simply prove his characters’ conspiracy theories to be pure and simple hallucinations, Rivette performs the far more difficult task of keeping us perpetually uncertain about them: now we see them, now we don’t. In fact we can never be certain whether they exist or not because our need for them is so palpable.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still.
