SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW 1997
A film review by Timothy Voon
Copyright 1998 Timothy Voon
1 :-) for the ice maiden
When I first heard that Smilla had a sense of snow, I was expecting her to climb Mt Everest. She doesn't. Instead this ice maiden spits liquid nitrogen with a vengeance and shoots icicles from her arse. She is one seriously, emotionally frozen lass who is perpetually on the edge of the toilet seat. What is Smilla's problem? Her Icelandic mother died when she was six depriving her of the comfort of breast milk. Her Anglo-Saxon father whisks her away to the confines of Denmark, away from the open spaces of Greenland. She then competes with her father's bimbette mistress for his love, before she befriends a deaf Icelandic boy who gets pushed off the roof of her apartment blocks. So it's not surprising that Smilla (Julia Ormond) gets pretty pissed off when her only friend gets killed. The reclusive, bitter Smilla shouts foul play, not because she has a feeling for snow, but because she's got a feeling it's murder.
The story then revolves around bizarre meteorites and ancient parasitic worms, which is all fantastically unbelievable. These elements serve as a mere distraction to the far more interesting Smilla on which the story is based. This woman who bites, fights, spits to get her way makes an interesting character, but she is also confused, frightened and fragile making her a bit of an enigma. If only this movie carried more romance than mere mystery and suspense, then perhaps Gabrielle Byrne would not have been wasted as a male body. He gets to bed Smilla and temporarily defrosts the ice maiden, but that's as interesting as his character gets. Annoyingly, he is so mysterious that he can't make up his mind whether he wants to be a good guy or bad guy – leaving the audience with little hope of figuring him out.
This movie has an interesting feel to it that one finds hard to put into words, except to say that one gets a good sense of frost when Smilla's around. Although it scores poorly in the department of plot conclusion, it redeems itself in creating a character as memorable as Smilla.
Timothy Voon e-mail: stirling@netlink.com.au
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