Icelandic Cuisine Anyone?

[lsanderson]

For kijjohnson, them old Norwegian cookbooks ain't seen nothing yet:

A Haunting Enigma of Violence and Chaos

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: February 29, 2008

The picture of Iceland that emerges in Baltasar Kormákur’s “Jar City” is vivid and powerful but not something the country’s tourist board would be likely to endorse. The landscape has its austere poetry to be sure — mountains framing the apartment blocks of Reykjavik, spits of volcanic rock jutting into a churning sea — but a fog of damp unhappiness seems to pervade every face and conversation.

And yet by the end of this film, based on a popular mystery novel by Arnaldur Indridason, it is hard not to feel a certain affection for the place. Partly this is because Mr. Kormákur’s fondness for Iceland and its stoical, surname-free people is evident from start to finish. His hero, in particular, a homicide detective named Erlendur (Ingvar E. Sigurdsson), takes on the features of a national paragon. He enjoys traditional Icelandic cuisine — “The usual?” a takeout server asks him; “Yes, I’ll have a sheep’s head” is the reply — and carries himself with a weary dignity that makes most of Ingmar Bergman’s characters seem frivolous by comparison.

...

The emotions at the heart of this philosophical detective story are dark and tangled, like the grisly surprises that seem to be buried under every floorboard. “Jar City” is chilly and cerebral but also morbidly and powerfully alive to grossness and physicality. At home one evening Erlendur blithely tears into his customary sheep’s head with his fingers, munching an eyeball while he reviews a case file. It’s at once grotesque, sensual and strangely tender, all words that might equally describe this strange and absorbing movie.All