A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Tuesday, January 27, 2026

Winter Brothers (Hlynur Pálmason, 2017)

Elliott Crosset Hove in Winter Brothers

Cast: Elliott Crosset Hove, Simon Sears, Vic Carmen Sonne, Lars Mikkelsen, Peter Plaugborg, Michael Brostrup, Anders Hove, Birgit Thøt Jensen, Laurits Honoré Rønne, Frédéric André. Screenplay: Hlynur Pálmason. Cinematography: Maria von Hausswolff. Production design: Gustav Potoppidan. Film editing: Julius Krebs Damsbo. Music: Toke Brorson Odin. 

Hlynur Pálmason's Winter Brothers begins in darkness, with a few lights shuttling around in the blackness that eventually reveal that we are in a mine, part of the limestone quarry and chalk factory that forms the setting for the film. It's a way of setting up the contrast of dark and light that gives the film its peculiar power. This is a bleak setting for wintry lives, particularly those of the brothers, Emil (Elliott Crosset Hove) and Johan (Simon Sears), who work in the factory. There's not much story to be told in the movie beyond delineating the tensions that exist between the brothers, the unsettled Emil and the more stoic Johan, but Pálmason, with the significant aid of Maria von Hasswolff's cinematography, provides a darkly poetic vision of figures in a forbidding landscape. 

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