AS IT IS IN HEAVEN
Director: Kay Pollak Stars: Michael Nyqvist, Frida Hallgren, Helen Sjoholm, Lennart Jahkel
Reviewed by PETER KRAUSZ
Nominated for best foreign language film at the Oscars in 2004, this Swedish film by Kay Pollak uneasily combines full blown melodrama with naturalistic drama to a mixed effect.
A noted orchestra conductor, haunted by being bullied as a child, suffers a heart attack in his early forties and retires to the quiet life in a small Swedish village. The film then develops the characters of the local choir, pastor, and other townspeople into a melting pot of underlying issues, concerns, struggles and unrealized goals. Michael Nyvqist plays the conductor with a mixture of aggression, passivity and naivity, some of which never quite rings true, and the relationships he develops with the town seem occasionally facile and forced.
That the film, in typical Swedish style, leads to a tragic catharsis, as well as a positive tone, overall makes the film seem more compelling than it really is. It is only when you unpack the simplistic writing, and the underdeveloped characters, that you discover that this film, despite its 125 minute running time, doesn’t end up saying much at all.
Score: 5/10
Reviewed by PETER MALONE
Swedish Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, this absorbing drama has proven very successful in unexpected markets (staying on in some Australian cinemas for almost a year). It has a great deal going for it, not least the music and the story of the development of a choir.
The focus of the film is a very talented musician, Daniel. The opening shows him as a little boy playing the violin in a wheatfield and then being bullied. As he grows up, tended by a loving mother, he wins music exams and eventually becomes a famous (and demanding) conductor. A physical collapse sends him back to his village in Sweden where he has bought the old school.
The film shows Daniel settling in, the response of the villagers, the approach of the pastor to ask him to help. Daniel gradually acclimatises and thaws in his relationships. He accepts the post of cantor and proceeds to train the ramshackle choir as if they were to be professionals. Some of these sequences are quite exhilarating as is their growing sense of worth and their improving performances.
However, there is a great deal more drama going on.
As the tile quote from the Lord’s Prayer indicates, this is a film about religion. And, its message is quite subversive – but very much in the spirit of the gospel and Jesus’ message. (One might note that, popular as the film is, it is more critical of authoritarian religion and its impositions than The Golden Compass, and rightly so).
The figure of contention is the pastor who shows that a married minister of religion may still be prim, prudish and puritanical with a severe Augustinian view of sexuality compounded by some Reformation strictness. There are some powerful scenes with his wife where he equates sexuality with sin. His wife is very critical of the concept of God and sin (rigid and unforgiving) that her husband lives by. This leads to his antagonism towards Daniel and his alienation of his community who have been thrilled by their awakening in the choir and are prepared to form their own community where gospel values and joy are paramount.
This has a profound effect on Daniel and on the young woman who runs a local shop and whose relationships have been the scandalised talk of the town. She is obviously a parallel character with some of the less respectable characters in the gospel – and she learns that love and compassion overcome a multitude of sins.
Audiences will enjoy the singing, especially the song sung by the battered wife of the man who bullied Daniel as a boy. There is a final united harmony sequence where competing choirs all hum as one – a glimpse, perhaps, of ‘as it is in heaven’.