Feud punctuates boring job
No, the new film “Rams” is not a hot- off- the- presses behindthe- scenes dramatization of an NFL team moving from St. Louis to Los Angeles. Instead, it is an Icelandic film about two sheep- herding and feuding brothers in a crisis when disease threatens their flocks.
If writer- director Grimur Hakonarson’s goal is to accurately show the isolation and boredom of a shepherd’s life in Iceland, he has succeeded admirably.
Gummi ( Sigurour Sigurjonsson) and Kiddi ( Theodor Juliusson) are brothers who are about 60, live next door to each other, herd sheep for a living, and haven’t spoken to each other in 40 years. The film opens with Gummi frustrated that he has come in second to Kiddi in a local contest for best ram — sort of the Icelandic village sheep version of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.
But the village switches to panic mode when the winning sheep turns out to have scrapie, a degenerative brain disease, similar to mad cow disease, that’s highly transmittable. That means all the sheep in the valley have to be slaughtered, and the shepherds must wait two years before replacing the flock to ensure that the disease is eliminated.
While this would create dire economic circumstances for the entire town, the film doesn’t really address that. Hakonarson instead is interested in the bizarre relationship between the brothers and the causes of their feud ( which doesn’t come until the second half of the film, so no spoilers here).
One can’t deny the skill of the filmmaking — “Rams” won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section in 2015, and it really does seem to capture what it would be like to be a modernday shepherd — but if you are determined to enjoy it, Hakonarson will throw every challenge in your path. If the ultraslow pacing, sparse dialogue and depressingly gray pallette don’t get you, perhaps that super big close- up of a toeclipping session will.