The Swan

The opening shot establishes the film’s primary value: the powerful force of nature. But the film shifts from the untrammelled ocean tide to the more stable, sweeping fertility of the land. That’s what provides the humans with sustenance and grounding. 

The central family’s three generations have different relationships with nature. Consequently, they differ in their self-knowledge and integrity. The oldest, Karl and Olof, live modestly but comfortably off their land and cattle. Their marriage is also easy, tender, solid. They have been taking in wayward kids — like Olof’s niece’s nine-year-old daughter Sol here — in hopes that they will find meaning and maturity in the rhythms of farm work.  

They’ve had better luck with these charges than with their own daughter. Asta has lost their harmony with the land. She’s gone to university, lost her husband, has slept around, and comes home pregnant and having blown her final exams.  She ridicules her parents’ small scale of dairy farming, asserting they will be doomed if they don’t go to larger-scale robotic milking. Of course, automated milking loses the immediacy of the hands-on relationship with nature.  Even the city has failed to steady her restless spirit. She has no patience for Sol. Even Asta’s ardour for the black stallion is intermittent and selfish.   

The itinerant hand Jon is more comfortable with nature but shares Asta’s hunger for something more. She ridicules his dedication to writing and capriciously takes him as an occasional lover. She ultimately drops him, possibly to his death. 

Jon romanticizes Asta and thinks he could free and satisfy her passionate nature if only she would let herself go.  But that is a writer’s fantasy, not an effective response to her mercurial wildness. With no grounding or self-acceptance, Asta takes her husband back for a fervid, disappointing one-night stand.

Jon’s scenes with Sol show him sensitive, caring, understanding. When she comes upon him masturbating in the meadow we see his loneliness, his comfort in nature, but the very weakness and indulgence that will drive him into his drunken stupor at the fair. 

These adult worlds are a mystery to young Sol, whose perspective governs the narrative. At her oceanside home she had stolen and lied. In the fields she encounters the serious cycle of life. She witnesses and is bloodied by the birth of a calf. She is heartbroken at its inevitable slaughter and eating. She witnesses the puzzling to-and-fro of Jon’s relationship with Asta, who constantly denies Sol the connection she craves. 

Asta’s fullest conversation is her frightening story of a monster at the lake who will try to seduce Sol into death. In the climactic scene at that lake, the monster Sol experiences is the magnificent swan that swoops down from the heaven, regally sails toward her in the water, then soars back away. In addition to its beauty and grace, the swan represents a natural integrity lost to the generation that has detached itself from nature. In that model Sol may find the lesson she needs to live a natural, integrated life.

We might be tempted to read the swan in either the Leda or Ugly Duckling contexts, but this film seems rather to luxuriate in the Icelandic mythic force of the land.
     Much of the film’s power and effectiveness derives from Gríma Valsdóttir’s performance as Sol. Her child’s face seems to grow ageless as her experiences deepen her emotional range and expose the aspirations and failings of the generation she is about to grow into. She seems to have the potential to embrace the passion of that wild tide, yet rooted in the soil.