Smilla

This mystery picture begins on a crashing-meteor opening and concerns about Smilla(Julia Ormond), a lonely scientist resident in Copenhagen. The grumpy Smilla is an half-America and half-Inuit with many problems of adaptation and her father(Robert Loggia) is a rich financier. When she returns home discovers the body of six-years-old friend named Isaiah(Miano) nearly her apartment building. Smilla believes the kid was killed and starts investigating , it leads to the Greenland mining company that is owner the magnate Tork(Richard Harris). Meanwhile she falls in love with her suspicious neighbor(Gabriel Byrne).

The picture based on Peter Hoeg's best seller novel packs suspense,thrills,intrigue, tension and interesting character study. The story is well developed though its final fail to sustain the outcome and is a little bit crappy. Suspenseful and mysterious musical score by Hans Zimmer and Harry Gregson-Williams. Exceptional secondary casting mostly formed by British actors such as Jim Broadbent,Vanessa Redgrave,Bob Peck, Tom Wilkinson, among them. Evocative and cold cinematography is consistently created by Jorgen Persson, Billie August's usual cameraman.Location photography is particularly breathtaking with impressive images like a large icebreaker ship, snowy outdoors and giant floes thawing, among others. This partially successful first attempt at the thriller and tense mystery is efficiently directed by August. Billie is the Danish's best director, an expert on intelligent dramas as ¨Pelle the conqueror¨which took the best foreign-language film Oscar , ¨Twist and shout¨,¨The best intentions¨, ¨House of spirits¨, and ¨Les Miserables¨. Rating : Well worth seeing, better than average.

This is not a movie about how Inuit hunt for seals. Smilla lives in present day Copenhagen. This movie is anything but formulaic. It is part murder mystery, part paranoid thriller with faceless villains like the Conversation, part James Bond, with a drop of science fiction, and like none of those all that much.

The victim of a possible murder is a 6 year old boy whom you gradually get to know and care for deeply via flash backs of his tragic life.

One of the themes is trust. Smilla never knows whom she can trust. We in the audience weave back and forth trying to decide who is truly trying to help her and who to kill her or at least deflect her from her quest of finding out why and how someone would harm that little boy.

The movie is a maddening puzzle with clues coming thick and fast, but nothing making much sense. All you know is some very powerful people are involved and are ruthless in keeping silence. Smilla takes huge risks to gather information she has no particular reason to believe may be relevant other than others seem to be hiding it. Like a standard mystery novel, all is finally explained.

One interesting twist is, you in the audience even begin to distrust the caustic Smilla with her one-pointed push for vengeance.

Usually in a movie with a great many characters, I often find it hard to keep from confusing them. In this movie, the characters are all distinctly drawn, partly with a rich mixture of accents, so I had no such problem.

Some of the casting choices seemed a bit off, in particular Smilla's father's new teenage wife, Benja, who was obviously much older than a teenager, which made some of Smilla's cracks about her age not ring true.

Based upon the bestseller by Peter Hoeg, "Miss Smilla's feeling for snow", it would have been hard for the movie to disappoint. The performances by all are exceptional, not least Julia Ormonds portrayal of Smilla, as icy as the landscape that involves (and evolves) the movie. The movie has an almost poetic feel, so beautifully is it paced, and the story draws you in steadily as Smilla searched for the truth behind her young friends death. There are enough surprises, twists and turns to keep most people happy, and the warmth of the two leads performances are in great contrast to the snow that provides the story. I couldn't recommend this story enough to fans of the book, or anyone who is interested in seeing a movie that is not your ordinary run of the mill hollywood movie, but one with depth, character and genuine emotion.

Superb.

A scientist who heads up a mining company in Greenland discovers a way to make money and garner power. However, in doing so he endangers others. After a child supposedly commits suicide, a woman who has doubts about the death begins an investigation in behalf of the dead boy. Her life is then threatened, but she never gives up. Eventually, she comes face to face with her enemies on a lonely ice floe far to the north. At times the story was hard to follow, and I felt it had a few holes in it. Sometimes it just didn't make sense. Still, it was worth the seeing.

n a cold December day in Copenhagen, a young boy named Isaiah falls to his death from the roof of the block of flats where he lives. The official police view is that he slipped and fell while playing on the roof. Smilla Jaspersen, a neighbour of Isaiah and his mother, does not accept that his death was an accident. Isaiah had a fear of heights, so was unlikely to have been playing on the roof; moreover, the footprints in the snow do not support the police version. Smilla therefore decides to start her own investigation to find out what really happened.

Isaiah and his mother belonged to Denmark's Greenlandic minority, and Smilla herself grew up in Greenland, the daughter of a Danish father and Greenlandic mother. She is in her late thirties, and works as a freelance mathematician and expert on the physics of ice and snow, although she has no formal academic qualifications. She discovers, however, that Isaiah's father was an employee of a Danish mining corporation and that he died in mysterious circumstances during an expedition to Greenland organised by this corporation. She begins to suspect that Isaiah's death was also in some way linked to the company, and learns that they are organising another voyage to Gela Alta, a small island off the coast of Greenland, although she does not know what the object of this voyage is. Nevertheless, she believes that the key to the mystery lies on this remote island and joins the crew of the ship as a stewardess, just ahead of the police who resent her interference in the case and are trying to arrest her.

This was one of those films that I enjoyed more than the original novel. Peter Hoeg's book was itself in some ways reminiscent of a film. The first half, with its urban setting, its tough, gritty investigator and its suggestion of a web of corruption and wrongdoing in high places, reminded me of a Humphrey Bogart style film noir, and the second part, set on the ship as it makes its way through the Arctic ice, of one of those filmed versions of Alistair MacLean thrillers that were so popular in the sixties and seventies. I found, however, that it suffered from an over-complex plot and was too slow moving to work as a thriller. Bille August's version removes some of the complexity of the plot and moves along at a faster pace. The revelation about exactly what lies below the ice comes earlier in the film than it does in the book- possibly August realized that the book's ending, more science fiction than science fact, was one of its weak points, and wanted to get this detail out of the way to allow the closing scenes of the film to concentrate more on the battle between Smilla and the villains. The film keeps, however, the book's atmospheric sense of place- there were some wonderful shots of Copenhagen in winter and of the Arctic ice.

Julia Ormond seemed to be the cinema's Big New Thing of the mid-nineties. Her role in 'Smilla's Sense of Snow' followed starring roles in three big Hollywood films, 'Legends of the Fall', 'First Knight' and 'Sabrina'. Since then she seems to have disappeared from the radar altogether and I have often wondered what has happened to her.. Her performance in 'Smilla', however, is a good one and she makes an appealing heroine. Rather more appealing, in fact, than Hoeg's original character, who combines a strong sense of justice with a gift for rudeness and sarcasm. Of the other actors, the best was Richard Harris as the chief villain, although he was probably considerably older than the character envisaged by Hoeg.

Although it is very different in its visual style, this atmospheric thriller is perhaps the nearest that the modern cinema comes to old-fashioned film noir. Despite its weaknesses it remained watchable throughout. It confirmed my view (based on 'Pelle the Conqueror' and 'The House of the Spirits') that Bille August is a highly talented director. 7/10