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Thread: KON-TIKI (Joachim Rønning, Espen Sandberg 2012)

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    KON-TIKI (Joachim Rønning, Espen Sandberg 2012)

    Joachim Rønning, Espen Sandberg: KON-TIKI (2012)


    AGNES KITTELSEN AND PAL SVERRE VALHEIM HAGEN IN KON-TIKI

    Authentic-feeling Norwegian film takes us across the Pacific on a balsa wood raft

    Here at last is a film showing the great true adventure story of the middle of the twentieth century, an inspiration for every kind of nature explorer since. In 1947 a Norwegian, Thor Heyerdahl, who could not swim and, as we see in a background passage, had nearly drowned in an icy pond as a boy, built a balsa wood raft and assembled a small crew and sailed 4,300 miles across the Pacific to prove what nobody seemed willing to believe, that Polynesia could have been settled by South Americans, not Asians, in pre-Columbian times. Kon-Tiki is a splendid film, but curiously understated. It's not the kind of film anybody cares about nowadays, though it might be hot stuff if it were a documentary and this adventurous voyage had just happened. Audiences expect fancy stuff now, a sea voyage with a CGI Bengal tiger as in Life of Pi, or tremendous weather effects as in The Perfect Storm. But somebody has cared about this story, if Heyerdahl's book has sold 50 million copies in 70 languages, and his documentary won the Academy Award in 1951, for a black and white film shot on one 16mm camera. One of the scariest things is how often that camera, in this film, seems about to fall into the ocean.

    The early passages, after establishing him as a spirited adventurer (Thor is the Norse god of thunder and lightening, by the way), show Heyerdahl trying to get sponsorship, vainly, and gathering his crew, with some lovely, atmospheric shots of what's meant to be Forties New York. He got a crew alright, but all the potential sponsors this charismatic young man (memorably embodied by the actor Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen) went to see, including The National Geographic Society, turned him down. The plan was deemed quixotic, absurd, and it was also too unusual. Heyerdahl's relationship with wife (Agnes Kittelsen) and family seems a bit distant. After his New York applications fail, he makes an awkward call to Norway to his wife to say he won't be coming home, because time requires that he go immediately to Peru. The strongest relationship is with Herman Watzinger (Anders Baasmo Christiansen), a former engineer turned refrigerator salesman with "a marriage that isn't going anywhere", a chubby man, not an adventurer, but desperate for adventure. He is to be the most uneasy member of the crew. It's in opposing him that Heyerdahl shows his absolute faith in his theory and unwillingness to depart from it to lower the risks. A few others emerge too, the rakish young Torstein Raaby (dashingly handsome Jakob Oftebro), and the reedy sailor Bengt Danielssen (Gustaf Skarsgård), certainly worth having since nobody else had sailing experience. (I memorized all these names as a child, pouring over the book illustrations.)

    The raft journey starts without ceremony: all of a sudden, there it is out in the water, with its picturesque square sail with the Polynesian mask painted on it in red, and the six men, still wearing suits and ties, soon to become bearded and weatherbeaten and go about in underwear or swim suits. The film doesn't go into a lot of detail about what they eat, how the sleep, their equipment and interactions, focusing more on the sense of the men out on the water and the sometimes devastating uncertainty about the whole venture. They do not really have much control over where the raft will go, and it can go terribly wrong.

    Forty minutes into Kon-Tiki there's a big storm -- "not so bad," Heyerdahl says afterwards. One of the men is almost eaten by a shark. The parrot, flying out over the water one day, is gobbled up by one. But the funny thing is that the best part is the silence and the passivity, which project the tension of uncertainty better than any dramatic effects.

    There's nothing so spectacular here. Filming a big balsa wood raft sailing 5,000 miles, with the encounters with sharks and razor coral reefs with a feel of natural authenticity probably wasn't exactly easy, though, considering this is the most expensive film ever made by Norwegians. The beauty of it is that it's not showy. Maybe a lot of the money went into hiding the effort, letting us just feel like we're on board. Unlike Life of Pi, whose turbulent seas were all staged in a giant tank, Kon-Tiki was shot out on the open sea. The filmmakers insisted that the "unique challenges" they faced from shooting that way would strengthen the film, and of course this comes through, no doubt in the gnarly look of the crew as well as a je-ne-said-quoi being-there feel that comes from shooting a film out where you're supposed to be. We don't think authentic sharks were used, however.

    There's not a lot of drama, just a bunch of lean, sunburnt Scandinavians climbing around, the radio man cursing because he can't get reception. There are a couple of funny moments. When there's a whole school of sharks circling the raft one man throws out what he thinks is "anti-shark powder," given them by a supplier to test out, but the others point out it's tomato soup -- they must have eaten the "anti-shark powder."

    There could have been a bit more about the technical side, more diagrams of the route and the raft and information about where the wood came from, material in the book that's been dropped. What's nice about Kon-Tiki is that through its willingness to be simple and just tell the story as Heyerdahl told it, the audience has a chance to digest the enormity of the event. When the men land on a Polynesian island and shout and hug each other, you realize you may not ever have felt such a sense of achievement. Few people could. There are levels of the game. And this is up there.

    Kon-Tiki, 118 mins., which was chosen as a Best Foreign Oscar finalist in 2013, debuted in Norway and at Toronto in August and September 2012, with many festival and country releases since. It began rolling out in the US, a Weinstein release, 26 April 2013. Screened for this review in Albany, California 17 May 2013 in the English version (with some French); it was shot simultaneously in Norwegian and English language versions.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 05-17-2013 at 08:48 PM.

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