Director Margreth Olin presents quite a curious and appropriate pairing of subjects in Songs of Earth. In this contemplative documentary, the filmmaker visits her parents at her isolated childhood home in the Norway, and the meat of the film is the remembrances and reminiscences shared by her father, Jørgen Mykløen, who is 84 and has lived quite a life with his wife, Olin’s mother, Magnhild. What surrounds these two on-camera subjects and their child/director is the ravishing beauty of the landscapes, half covered by ice from the frosty precipitation that looms over the mountaintops and half by the greenery below those peaks, in a valley where a few, scattered villages reside. The human part of this movie, then, is a lesson in storytelling humility. When the camera turns to nature, as it does so often, it’s humbling in a very different way.
This is a small and quiet film, despite or, in some way, because of the hugeness of nature – or, as Mykløen refers to it (as non-native speakers will see in the film’s English subtitles, translated from the spoken Norwegian), “Nature” with a capital “N.” The word “contemplative” has already been attributed to the experience of watching the movie, but it really is the most perfect description. Mykløen speaks every so often, opining on his many years of life, his pride in a daughter who loves him enough to make this documentary, his memories of trailing this surrounding land with his father, his recollections of a terrible family tragedy a couple of generations ago (involving avalanches that seem terribly inevitable in this part of the world), and, at other times, his marriage to Magnhild, without whom he would be lost.
Magnhild speaks, too, and she even sings tributes to the surrounding land and trees and frozen estuaries and waterfalls, in an act of pure and unadulterated goodness during a movie filled with such acts – and even, it seems, made from an ultimate one. We can see that the scene around these three deserves the treatment, too, as Mykløen tours the various spots where ‒ thanks to Olin’s drone camera, which captures everything with startling clarity ‒ you can see practically everything in a clearing for dozens of miles. The tundra calves where it meets a precipice, and amid the thunder of the many lightning storms that rumble overhead, we hear the crack as a new fissure develops just beneath the topmost sheets of ice.
Throughout, Olin also gives us interludes directly relating Nature to humankind. Early on, shots of the craggy ice fields are intercut with extreme close-ups of the skin on Mykløen’s hands and neck and face. Just like the Earth, he’s been around a while, and Nature has had its way with both of them. He’s seen suffering and death, and he’s experienced goodness and light, too. In the same way, the planet is even now turning inside out on itself, thanks to the constant warming of the globe, yet there are still lovely sights to see, an earthy coldness to feel, like this stretch of the mountains in Norway.
All these thoughts feel a bit scattered by the movie that inspires them, but that more or less still works in the case of a documentary like this one. It isn’t a film with a clear thesis or a point to make (even, it should be said, about anything related to climate change, which is simply something that may come to mind for its prospective viewers). We simply observe a pair of cheerful people remembering while they still can, loving while they are still able, and walking around in the beautiful world they inhabit while doing both of those things. Perhaps the overall effect of Songs of Earth is rather slight, but it’s worthwhile to watch simply to slow down the rhythm of our own lives’ pace.
Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing
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