Mereghetti’s report card: The defeat of a priest against wild nature (score: 7½)- Corriere.it

A western without Sioux and Cheyenne, without bison and prairies, without sheriffs and outlaws but with the same mythical ambition to dig into the roots of a land and a population to bring out its history and tragedies, tensions and hopes. In addition to a significant Fordian quotation from “Hellish Challenge”. But with a not negligible difference: we are not in the US West but in the‘Iceland Of late 19th centurystill under Danish rule.

And the protagonist of the film, the young man, leaves from Denmark priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), commissioned by the bishop of open a church in a village on the southeast coast of Iceland and determined to photograph people and environments that he will find on his journey with a cumbersome camera collodion plate machine. This is why he doesn’t disembark near his destination: he wants to indulge in a long journey of approachwhere he hopes to find subjects for his photographs.

“Godland” of the 38-year-old Icelander Hlynur Pálmason is the account of that journey, to discover a wilderness (far from the promises of the title, “Land of God”) which will turn out to be much more tricky than Lucas could have imagined, but also much more seductive and disturbing than the young man was prepared to face. Because the journey, which occupies half of the film’s two hours and 23 minutes, will put a strain not only on his physical forces but also the deep reasons of his own beliefs.

Sure he can do just what he sees thanks to the ability to fix it on the photographic plate, of being able to know what he encounters only by “imprisoning” its forms thanks to the silver salts fixed with collodion, Lucas will learn the hard way the irreducibility of a Nature that in its apparent coldness rebels against any form of understanding, even that of his faiththus ending up undermining even the religious certainties of the man of the church.

Pálmason, also author of the film scriptalmost eliminates the role of dialogues, especially during the approaching journey to the village, and entrusts to long fixed shots the tale of «clash» between Lucas’ ambition (who wants to reduce everything to pure aesthetic forms, to «beautiful images») and the impregnable force of Nature, inviting the viewer to rediscover the strength of cinema of the origins (even the format is the «square» one) and of his own mission — record reality and its ontological force — as if to free the eyes from the daily contact with generated images artificially. There is nothing “artificial” here anymore, even the filming respected the chronological progression of the film, to also seek in the acting the reflection of that struggle in front of which Lucas can only fail.

And indeed, when he arrives at the village the priest is unconscious, at the end of lifeforced upon “awakening” to come to terms with a changed self, deeply marked from that long journey he put his faith is in crisis. It is now that the underlying themes of the film, kept under wraps until now, emerge: the loss of meaning of the religious mission (in front of the church under construction the faithful dance and celebrate, as in «Hell Challenge»but once it’s finished Lucas will never give you a sermon), the temptations of the other sex (embodied by the two daughters of the man who hosts him), the discovery of physical force he was born in taste to win (in the ritual of fighting during the feast) and above all the weight of the two languages ​​through which the priest tries to communicate: the native Danish and thetough Icelandicwhose values ​​are reversed if the perspective becomes that of the locals («the Danish that I had to speak on Sundays was a terrible language, you choke the throat» says the guide who led Lucas to the village and who will unleash all the repressed anger of the priest).

While the film finds the force that enlivened many westerns, that of the clash between a man who wants dominate reality and a Nature that does oblige to surrender.