Shots in the dark: a movie that shows you don't need a bullet to make a bang

Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) is the first feature from the Inuit film industry in Canada's arctic Nunavut territory. It might also be one of the most beautiful movies ever made--at least it feels that way in 2002, when beauty has become a secondary consideration in cinema. Try to think when a movie last moved you with naturally achieved visual majesty--as opposed to the kind created in a computer--and you might find yourself groping for a memory, though there are many moments in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and a few in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring that approach transcendence.

What follows may sound like a National Geographic travelogue or a bigger, brighter version of Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922). But don't turn the page until I've mentioned the Macbeth-like murders, the woman who sleeps with two married brothers, the chase, the rape, and the culmination of the blood feud that drives The Fast Runner.

Directed by Zacharias Kunuk and luminously photographed on widescreen digital video, it's set in the mists of time on the shimmering ice plateaus where nomadic bands subsist on fish, birds' eggs, the odd rabbit and, when the hunting's good, caribou and walrus. Here an igloo can be built in no time to provide a house or a nightclub where the entertainment will include bawdy singsongs and contests--in which men take turns slugging one another's faces--for a woman's hand. Once the woman has been won and impregnated, her husband will press his ear to her stomach to get a welcome kick in the face from the growing baby, as prospective dads do everywhere. Meanwhile, the crystalline wastes and chemistry-set sunsets--where the blue of the night meets the gold of the day--look like they were scripted by Keats and photographed by Turner. They are not there to prettify the film but to suggest the pantheistic nature of the universe.

The Fast Runner is partially about men and women doing what they must to survive, which involves working, flirting and telling ribald jokes. "If you want to lift a heavy rock, think of it as a woman's butt," Amaqjuaq tells his younger brother Atanarjuat. Though reminiscent in its leisurely rhythm and leathery protagonists of Ulrike Koch's 1997 documentary The Saltmen of Tibet, Kunuk's film manages the feat of being both a stirring, poetic revenge saga and an ethnographic study.

Atanarjuat and Amaqjuaq are cousins of Oki, whose grandfather was slain by a mysterious shaman visiting from "up north" when they were kids. Infected with the shaman's evil, the grownup Oki reveals the kind of malignant streak that drove Magua in The Last of the Mohicans. When Atanarjuat steals away the woman, Atuat, who had been promised to Oki, the spurned suitor contrives to have his sister seduce Atanarjuat--their coupling has an earthy humor and an erotic charge you won't find in a Hollywood film--and become his second wife, knowing she will cause mischief. When she then tries it on with the half-awake Amaqjuaq in the communal tent, she is banished.

This gives Oki and his henchmen their excuse to attack the brothers. They gore the slumbering Amaqjuaq, but Atanarjuat escapes, haring naked across the ice with the killers in pursuit. On and on they go, until Atanarjuat's feet are shredded. Mirroring earlier shots of huskies-and-sled in full flight, it is the most thrilling and terrifying chase sequence you'll see this summer. Its ending ushers in the final act of the film, during which Oki rapes Atuat and vengeance takes an unlikely turn.

Kunuk makes eloquent use of long shots depicting characters moving across the landscape toward clusters of figures or a single figure in the distance, and of closeups: The extraordinary topography of the Inuit faces is that of people whose emotional trials are magnified by enduring the most desolate of landscapes. The result is a movie that Satyajit Ray would have been proud of--though it also resonates with the same primal power that characterized Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth (1930), F.W. Murnau and Flaherty's Tabu (1931) and Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son (1997). In Kunuk's masterpiece, there's barely a shot that doesn't radiate the divinity of life. Better that, one might contend, than a $100 million gross on its opening weekend.

Graham Fuller is Interview's Film Writer at Large.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning