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Gudmundsson’s “Beautiful Creatures,” the beautiful boreal horrors – Libération

Iceland

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In a particularly successful feature film, Icelandic filmmaker Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson films a group of young people, between school bullying, friendship and visions.

The name is doubly memorable: Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson. He is Icelandic and so gifted that he deserves an effort to memorize (and pronounce). It is necessary: ​​his second film, the Beautiful Creatures, is incredibly beautiful, in its patient way of filming violence and feelings – distinctly. The Beautiful Creatures poses a great filmmaker in the making (like his way of telling a story of astonishing mobility), provided that he does not tense up in academicism on the promised path. This film is even better than his first, Heartstone (2017), even less crowned with prizes, festivals, apart from in 2022 in Berlin, at the Panorama.

In the cinema today we see fewer gangs of guys, as if the essential had been said on this subject, in all tones. Seed of violence has Of sound and fury, of West Side Story has Stand by Me, passing by The Fury of Living of Nicholas Ray, the filmmaker to whom Gudmundsson is closest in muted lyricism – but without the night, diurnal cinema, of full light and full awareness, of a country, Iceland, where the day almost never sets in the summer. The time has come to look at the less hackneyed side of girl gangs. Except that Gudmundsson decides that not everything has been said about violence and friendship, shame and modesty of adolescence, which are the four themes intertwined here, as are the four boys at the center. The subtle magnificence of the film lies in its own way

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