When the light breaks
When the Light Breaks offers no easy consolation or resolution, but is a simple stark elegy worthy of the music of Jóhann Jóhannsson
Directed by Rúnar Rúnarsson
Starring: Elín Hall, Mikael Kaaber, Natla Njálsdottir
Released 23 May
8/10
The composer Jóhann Jóhannsson ultimately became renowned for the dark droning majesty of film scores, notably for Panos Cosmatos’s psychedelic revenger’s tragedy, Mandy. But at the heart of his own work, particularly on his 4AD albums IBM 1401, A User’s Manual and Fordlandia, was a radiant melancholy. He first hit upon this sweet spot with his 2002 setting of the Catullus poem “Odi et Amo”, sung as though by the universe’s most romantically bereft robot.
None of the films that have used his music have approached this secret sublime melancholy quite as effectively as When the Light Breaks, the fourth feature from Icelandic director Rúnar Rúnarsson, which returns to “Odi et Amo” like a wound that won’t heal. If Jóhannsson’s secret weapon was the grain of the human voice strained through electronic distortion, then Rúnarsson’s is the elfin face of Elín Hall. For the film’s 80 minute duration, the director rarely strays from her pale, haunted, freckled features, framed by a severe, slicked-back ginger crop, as they are contorted in a sorrowful symphony of sudden grief.
We meet Una with her lover Diddi, as they watch the sun go down, and he’s about to take the early morning plane to break up with his ex. They’re already planning the adventures they will have together once they’re an official couple. We follow Una the next morning as he makes her way to the school where she’s a performance art student. And we witness her as she receives the news that Diddi has died in a catastrophic road accident on the way to the airport.
Diddi’s hometown girlfriend Klara has flown in for the memorial service, and Una is wracked by awful jealousy for the designated partner, unable to reveal the truth of her relationship. But as the friends attempt to drink and dance the pain away, Klara gradually intuits the depths of Una’s loss, and the two are able to come to a delicate mutual sympathy, united in their shared if unstated loss. When the Light Breaks offers no easy consolation or resolution, but is a simple stark elegy worth of Jóhannsson, and surely marks Elín Hall, a musician herself, as a star whose time has come.
