COLD FEVER
A film review by Joan Ellis
Copyright 1996 Nebbadoon Syndicate
"Cold Fever" is a one-man road movie; it is also a cross-cultural feast so funny and touching, so eccentric, that we watch in fascination just to see what can possibly happen next. On one level, nothing happens in this movie; on another, everything does. Atsushi Hirata is a successful young Japanese businessman about to enjoy a golfing vacation in Hawaii. In short order we see that he is imprisoned in a world of corporate musts. He must make a toast, he must perform, he must do his duty, and finally, pushed by an elder, he must cancel his vacation in order to administer burial rites for his parents, who died in an automobile crash while living in Iceland. Only he can bring peace to their spirits. The melancholy young man is lifted by jetliner out of one culture and deposited in another utterly alien one. The great beauty of this movie, and its gift to the audience, is the extraordinary immediacy and strength of the cultures it evokes. Atsushi has chosen to cross the country during the impossible winter season--by cab, car, horse, and on foot. Propelled by obligation, he will allow nothing to keep him from reaching his goal. By the time he arrives, we are quite literally shivering in our seats from watching horizontal sleet blowing across an already frozen landscape. Thick-coated horses stand in the wind. Night hovers continually, lightened only by the ubiquitous whiteness. Alone on a one-lane road of rutted ice, Atsushi's few random encounters are with people who sing--almost in self-defense against the hostile climate that surrounds them. They sing in barns, at funerals, in the backs of trucks as they negotiate a countryside of white buildings, white water, and white ice. "Does anyone know you are going this way?" asks an ominous road sign. Finally, in a bar where the villagers drink "Black Death," the national sedative," and sing American cowboy songs, he meets an old man who will guide him on the perilous final leg of his impossible journey. The harshness and isolation have produced an Icelandic Jimmy Stewart. Atsushi says very little: "Very strange country; very long night; very complicated road system." Not much more than that. But he brings great dignity to his quest, and the rituals he performs for his parents are beautiful. His search is a majestic obligation that is the only and very ample thread on which the filmmakers hang their acute observations of a hostile climate and the culture created by it. Credit the cross-cultural independent film makers who imagined this story, and Masatoshi Nagase, who carries it as Atsushi. As he says at the end, "Sometimes, the road you take leads you to a place that's not on any map." He's right, and it is a very good trip.
Film Critic : JOAN ELLIS Film Title : COLD FEVER Word Count : 494 Rating : NR Studio : Artistic Isicle Films Running Time : 1h25m
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