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KARLOVY VARY 2013

XL: Don’t drink and drive the country

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- The last film by Icelandic director Marteinn Thorsson is an alcoholic trip which gives a nauseating view of Icelandic politics.

Imagine yourself slipping into an alcoholic coma, watching a screening of an 87-minute version of Smack My Bitch Up on a giant screen, and you will be getting close to the experience offered by XL [+see also:
interview: Marteinn Thorsson and Ólafu…
film profile
]
, the latest movie by Icelandic director Marteinn Thorsson, presented in competition in Karlovy Vary. This nauseating trip contains the same ratio of sex, alcohol and violence as the clip by Prodigy whilst at the same time using a subjective camera to make you experience an evening of debauchery organized by Leifur Sigudarson (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, also producer), a corrupt politician, an excessive pervert and pathetic father, the night before his forced commitment to a rehab centre.

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Suffering from an addiction to alcohol himself, the director uses many ploys – subjective vision, diverse distortions, blackouts – to communicate the sensorial perception of an alcoholic of this calibre, and the result is, all in all, quite disturbing. The subject should have been just as disturbing since, between the lines of the script and those sniffed at during the feature, it undertakes a vitriolic criticism of a political class that has thrown Iceland into an unprecedented economic and social crisis. The film focuses, however, on the man himself without taking a look at his political activities that we imagine to be as chaotic as the impudent and shameless life he lives on a daily basis. The cynical critique of the political scene is nevertheless recalled at the end of the film when Sigudarson appears — without any transition — completely sober, on television, delivering a moralizing speech that no one can believe at this stage.

Olafsson is imposing in his portrayal of the main character, detestable to perfection and without any extenuating circumstances to justify his behavior as a white-collar version of Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant. The construction of the film and especially its 8-hands syncopated editing give XL a certain character of its own, but its uncompromising journey also relegates it to the level of a festival hit with XS distribution opportunities.

 

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(Translated from French)

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