Formative memories of walking through blizzard conditions and driving on “black ice” have long put the kibosh on any personal nostalgia for living in a bona fide winter wonderland—being inconvenienced occasionally by a little rain is quite enough weather for me, thanks. Still, it’s nice to look at snowy landscapes once in a while. Three new movies provide just that… among other things.
Of course there’s nothing very nice about the story depicted in Society of the Snow, the latest screen retelling of the infamous 1972 Flight 571 saga—in which five crew and 40 passengers (most young members of an Uruguayan rugby team) crashed in the Andes. Assumed dead after initial searches, the dwindling survivors endured subzero temperatures and other perils for 72 days before they were rescued.
The tale begat an international nonfiction bestseller, Piers Paul Read’s 1974 Alive!, then several documentaries and two dramatic features: the 1976 Mexican exploitation hit Survive! and 1993’s US Alive, which was powerful despite a cast (including Ethan Hawke, Vincent Spano, and Josh Hamilton) of rather unconvincing South Americans. Society, an international co-production that is Spain’s official submission to the Oscars this year, is the best of the dramatizations so far—even if the American movie can probably still claim the title of most alarming crash-recreation sequence.
But then, this version from director J.A. Bayona (of Spanish horror The Orphanage, plus big-budget Hollywood fantasies A Monster Calls and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) is aiming even less than that prior effort at being a thriller. Like his 2012 The Impossible, which wove a fiction around the 2004 Indian Ocean tsumani, it gleans a grueling drama of survival from the spectacular hook of an high-casualty external disaster.
Almost immediately, this story became almost exclusively known for the cannibalism the dwindling survivors were forced to practice—a rather small part of their experience, but one that loomed large in the lurid popular imagination. (With desperately small food resources, some eventually resorted to consuming bits of fellow travelers’ frozen corpses.) But more harrowing still here are sections dealing with avalanches that further reduced their number. And this account impresses in the details of how a group with scant medical or survivalist training (or even experience with snow) between them nonetheless proved extraordinarily resourceful under the circumstances.
At nearly 2.5 hours, Society represents a fairly thorough chronicle that is nonetheless never sluggish, and which builds to considerable emotional impact—for me, at least, there are few things more deeply moving than the happiness felt when people finally get a break after prolonged, extreme hardship. The cast comprised mostly of relatively unknown actors from Uruguay and Argentina is very good, the film’s audiovisual design elements excellent. Even characters being killed by it here have to occasionally stop and admire the beauty of the remote high landscape they’re trapped in, as captured in Pedro Luque’s widescreen cinematography.
Society of the Snow is still playing in some theaters, including the Roxie on Sun/7.(Apologies for the tardy review—nobody told us it was opening Dec. 22.) As of Thu/4, it also begins streaming on Netflix.
An ostensibly more hospitable wintry environ doesn’t behave that way in Norwegian Dream, a first narrative feature by documentarian Leiv Igor Devold. Robert (Hubert Milkowski) has just arrived from Bialystok as a contracted foreign short-term employee at a fish processing plant in a seaside town. He’s housed with other Polish guest workers in a rooming house run by an exploitative landlady. They’re also exploited on the job, which is already grueling and dangerous enough without the added irritant of unpaid overtime hours. He’s just 19, but already carries himself with the defensive, close-mouthed manliness of someone made wary by experience.
Robert grows intrigued by coworker Ivar (Karl Bekele Steinland), who’s both a local and a sort of outcast—the Black, gay adopted son of the factory owner. But their friendship is hobbled by our hero’s fear of incurring his fellow emigres’ wrath (they already ridicule Ivar), as well as—it turns out—his own past experiences of homophobia. Further complicating things eventually are a threatened strike, and the arrival of Robert’s hot-mess mother Maria (Edyta Torhan).
An interesting window into issues of cheap-imported-labor exploitation even in supposedly progressive Scandinavia, Dream is well-made. But its script by three writers sometimes feels over-laden with narrative agenda items, insufficiently ballasted by rooting value. Lead Milkowski has a strong camera presence, and is able to make his character’s largely unarticulated inner conflicts palpable. Yet we don’t really believe in or care much about Robert’s attraction to Ivar, who is a bit of a gay cliche—a mercurial, voguing aspirant drag artiste. Worth a look, if ultimately somewhat unsatisfying, Norwegian Dream gets released to US On Demand platforms by Uncork’d Entertainment on Tue/2.
The sort of repression Robert fights to preserve—until he doesn’t—melts in the heat of Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, a documentary first feature by Anna Hints. Its protagonists are a group of Estonian women ranging roughly from twentysomethings to late middle-age, who gather for a cultural ritual of cleansing, inside and out. In a rural sauna, they expunge all kinds of toxins—from humorously pondering the 21st-century phenomenon of “dick pix” (among other baffling male behaviors) to baring traumatic experiences of rape and domestic battery. We get the sense that the kind of abuse-enabling “traditional gender roles” that have become less socially acceptable in many First World nations remain pervasive here, though these women are well aware that doesn’t make them right.
It may be eye-opening to some to see so much non-prurient nudity amongst normal bodies that sag and bulge in ways seldom permitted onscreen. (As a stereotypical Northern Californian who’s been going to clothing-optional hot springs for over 40 years, I found that element more innocuously familiar than especially liberating, let alone titillating.) We do not learn what drew these women together, or whether they already know each other, but the level of confessional intimacy is high. Occasionally they venture outside to take an icy plunge through a hole they’ve cut into a frozen lake nearby—the outdoor sequences here are particularly beautifully shot by d.p. Ants Tammick.
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is primarily a sort of group therapy session, much of it exposing the damaging effect on individuals of a patriarchal society. Such revelations have a universality, even if the co-production with France and Iceland is also regionally specific. While this is really a movie by and for women, it also provides a kind of education most men could benefit from. It opens Fri/5 at SF’s Roxie Theater, more info here.
