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Canberra Today 25°/29° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘Rams’ (M) *** and a half

rams movieTHE 2015 Cannes Film Festival jury for Un Certain Regard, recognising young talent and encouraging innovative and daring works, awarded its prize to Icelandic filmmaker Grimur Hakonarson’s third feature “Rams”, to which legend (for which I’ve not been able to unearth confirmation) has it that the audience gave a 10-minute standing ovation.

The legend, if correct, carries greater weight than the prize. A prize for an outcome determined by a public result can be worthy, but I mistrust prizes awarded for best creative achievement from a field of nominees following secret deliberation by one or more appointed peers.

Without doubt, “Rams” is innovative. Two houses stand perhaps 200 metres apart on a farm in an almost treeless Icelandic valley. In each lives a man no longer young. Each breeds sheep. At a recent show, the judge placed Kiddi’s winning ram half a point ahead of Gummi’s runner up. Both rams have the same sire, different dams.

That judgement exacerbates a 40-year friction between two brothers, who communicate by one writing a note about a farm matter and whistling for the dog to carry it to the other. The audience laughs gently at this amusing practice, without yet understanding its cause.

There is nothing amusing about the sudden appearance on the farm of the incurable, highly contagious neurodegenerative disease commonly called scrapie. How the film deals with the disaster – for that’s what it is, economically, emotionally – is as powerful a dramatic element for the film as is the rift between the brothers. It’s an element that finds increase as Gummi – or is it Kitti? The pair’s whiskered faces look almost identical – secretes a ram and a few ewes in the basement of his house. Neither brother can bear the prospect of euthanising the last of a champion line of breeding sheep. What follows is a rapprochement building to a powerful ending that leaves us to imagine what will happen next.

At Palace Electric

 

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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