Review by Beatrice On 20-Aug-2023
If one were to stop and listen to the work of the roots, who would be able to sleep?
Noise, breath, white storm looms and a herd of horses changes course and veers left, something must have spooked them.
Icelandic countryside, Christmas time, you can hear the radio.
Chapter 1
A cat, a dog, Maria and Ingvar engage in sheep herding.
She thrusts her slender arms into the animals' bellies for them to give birth.
They speak little but dwell on time travel while Ingvar prefers to stay in the hic et nunc.
They brand the sheep by numbering them and the activity seems to improve with each passing year.
Something sinister happens during a birth: a small being is born with the head and right leg of a sheep and the rest of a baby girl.
They begin to care for it as if it were their own child and name it Ada, dress and educate it as a human.
Chapter 2
One day Ada disappears but they find her again.
When Petur, Ingvar's brother, arrives, the balance begins to shake, Maria has committed something terrible and Petur has seen her.
Everything goes on as in a "happy" little family while Petur manifests his misgivings.
They dance, laugh, joke, drink, while Ada leaves and goes to the dog who then disappears.
Ada falls asleep on Igvar's belly and Maria takes Uncle Petur back to the bus telling him that Ada is a gift, a new beginning.
The tractor does not start, the dog is dead, Maria returns home and finds no one...
The ending thunders and resounds with
"Let me weep
My raw fate
And sigh for freedom..."
by Handel, formerly the score for Lars von Trier's Antichrist.
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments: there are consequences
Here, too, a distant land, a kind of mythological Colchis where anything can happen; no contact except with the impassable and cruel nature, where Eros and Thanatos always have the upper hand.
The god Pan was always represented with the horns and beard of a ram, a symbol linked to the earth, the fertility of the fields, the moon and the forces of the great Mother.
Iceland with its colonizations is narrated through dark and violent sagas and legends, populated by spirits and evil.
An island that remained lonely for a long time, subjected around 900 B.C. by the Norwegians to unification with their terr; it saw the exile of all those who had opposed it, who sought refuge in the mysterious Ice Island, an entirely new world with unspoiled nature in which numerous legends were born and countless magics were cultivated to ensure protection, good fortune and prosperity. A place forced into Christianity that preserved devotion to Odin and Thor in the private dimension, where family feuds, encounters with elves, giants and spirits reigned.
Johansson takes us back to this world through a dry but fruitful story of few words but eloquence where the relationship with nature is always deeply mysterious.
After Antichrist's taurine baby, Titane's metallic infant, Annette 's baby/baby and Border 's humanoid troll comes Lamb 's Ada half-child with a lamb's head and right arm.
A tender being birthed by a sheep and torn from it, decked out as a baby, dressed in light blue, with pants, named Ada, after Maria and Ingvar's dead daughter. A kidnapping, an embezzlement, a violation, an abuse, a misdeed.
A violent film, a magical, mysterious performance.
A film that opens a painful, tragic and cruel wound.
A direction that tears the silence on nature, hypnotizing the gaze of the observer of the irreparable.
Nature is commanded only by obeying it
20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice