The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat)
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DVD details
Actor: Lucy Tulugarjuk, Madeline Ivalu, Natar Ungalaaq, Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq, Sylvia IvaluBrand: Sony
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled)
Format: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.85:1
Running Time: 172 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-01-24
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
DVD Reviews of The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat)
DVD Review: The sublime North
Summary: 5 Stars
Forget its awards and honours, the Camera d'or from Cannes and that raft of Genies and a bagful of other festival citations. For now, there are only three things you need to know about Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner: (1) It is a superb film; (2) It is both intriguingly exotic and uniquely Canadian; (3) Although based on an ancient myth, and set on a distant shore a thousand years ago, it speaks eloquent volumes about the way we live now. The abiding myths are like that, of course, but few movies have managed to harness their timeless power -- this movie does.
The setting is the far north, that white expanse embedded in today's consciousness as a totem of all that's virginal and solitary and silent, a romantic escape from the hubbub of modernity.
Well, think again. Even at the dawn of the first millennium, the Inuit lived there, and they lived through a matrix of social and political tensions that will seem hauntingly familiar -- tensions that the subsequent centuries of apparent advances and creature comforts have done nothing to change or resolve.
This enduring dialectic is the subject of the re-enacted myth. Actually, the filmmakers prefer the term "relived," and with good reason. That's because, shooting on location with native actors talking in the Inuktitut language, director Zacharias Kunuk has contrived simultaneously to give the picture the realistic look of a documentary and the dream-like feel of a fable. So we're plunged directly into the daily minutiae of this other world -- its frozen geography and its igloo dwellings, its food and utensils and weapons and clothing, its little jokes and its chronic rigours. However, as the narrative gathers momentum, as the myth unfolds, its themes seep out of the recreated past and into our smug present.
Consequently, viewers are treated to an extraordinary experience, a sort of double vision. Stylistically, the film blends the anthropological with the epic -- Nanook of the North with Ran.
Substantively, there's an identical fusion of the then-and-there with the here-and-now -- we seem to be inside this ancient realm looking outward at our own existence, and being struck as much by the similarities as the differences.
Certainly, the story's initial note will ring a bell. The first sequence depicts the fall of this icy Eden. If the opening appears a bit confusing, even disorienting, so be it -- what can be more perplexing than original sin? Or as the script (by the late Paul Apak Angilirq) puts it: "Evil came to us like death -- we never knew how it happened." Yes, evil -- a word that isn't exactly underemployed these days; and a concept that the myths of religion were invented to explain, and to control.
This myth is no exception: How to deal with evil, and the terror it spreads, is our topic (our very current affair) for the next two hours and 52 minutes. Not surprisingly, the time races by.
Indeed, as the story-line develops, classical and Christian scholars will easily recognize their favourite tropes -- like patricide; like brotherly enmity; like scarlet women and jealous wives and murderous villains and sacred animals; like the wounded hero who is exiled on a long journey, yet fated to return to cleanse the kingdom of its hatred and restore the souls of its sinners.
Here he's known as Atanarjuat; other cultures might call him the Fisher King; still others would crown him with thorns.
However -- and this is crucial to the movie's hold on us -- all of these symbolic figures and patterns are dramatized with the utmost realism.
The picture is mythic in content but never in presentation. These people aren't just icons in an old saga; they're living, breathing folks who belch and break wind, who giggle and flirt, who strut and posture and, between bites from a caribou steak, sing bawdy songs that embrace timely truths. (Sample lyric: "Even a big man can't bring home enough food/ If what's hanging between his legs gets too stiff.")
This brand of realism is no accident. Instead, it's the long-practised method of Kunuk and his cinematographer Norman Cohn, who share an extensive background in video art, the slow-paced kind that emphasizes watching over telling. Alternating from sweeping panoramas to stark close-ups, from hunters mushing a sled over crevassed ice to a woman's gnarled hand holding a bone needle, their camera is keenly observant to both sights and sounds. It hears rhythms in the winter at its harshest (the incessant crack of footfalls on rock-hard snow); it sees beauty when the seasons change and the harshness briefly relents (a lone kayaker paddling over still waters glinting in the midnight sun).
That's not to say these guys can't shift into a kinetic gear when action is called. In fact, they have the skill to animate cinematic clichés. There's a chase sequence here that's as good as any I've seen in a decade. And there's a ritualistic punch-up, black and bruised, that puts any studio western to shame. Also, as with every paradise-lost myth, the violence is paired with an ample helping of sex -- sometimes brutish, often loving and, on more than one occasion, wonderfully erotic.
Naturally, a film with such a broad range demands a lot from its actors. They respond impeccably, professionals and amateurs alike. Natar Ungalaaq in the heroic title role, Pakkak Innukshuk as the resident villain, are both playing nicely rounded characters -- the one has his flaws, the other has his merits, and the performances reflect these duelling sides of the moral equation. With her flashing smile, Lucy Tulugarjuk is a delightfully designing woman, the kind of born drama queen who can somehow make even the most selfish act seem ingenuous. Finally, poignantly, Sylvia Ivalu weeps real tears as the beleaguered wife, streaming rivulets that bisect the tattooed lines on her swollen cheeks.
Too often, our Western response to aboriginal culture carries a strong whiff of the sentimental, of the patronizing and the politically correct. But Atanarjuat steadfastly resists that. Rather, it demands both to be heard in its own voice and to be appreciated on its own terms -- not as a quaint native artifact, but as a damn fine and a truly distinctive and a deeply pertinent film.
That pertinence is no more apparent than during the resolution, where the myth offers up its answer to the troubling riddle of evil. Only when the Fast Runnner slows down can he reach, and understand, his epiphany. Significantly, it comes before the practical matters -- and this is a practical society -- of meting out punishment and tempering justice with mercy. More important still, it comes from a man wielding power at the business end of a knife, and it wells up as a cry from the depths of his anguished heart. Bold, brave, direct, decisive, the cry doubles as an assertion, cutting through the clamour of the centuries and their cycles of violence, cutting through all the unholy dins in all the holy lands. Shouted in an ancient tongue, his four words speak to every age, none more forcibly than our own: "THE KILLING STOPS HERE." Conrad Alton, Filmbay Editor.
Description of The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat)
FAST RUNNER - DVD MovieThe Fast Runner turns the frozen landscape of northern Canada into the stage for an adventure as sweeping as The Odyssey or Beowulf. Adapted from an Inuit legend, The Fast Runner centers on Atanarjuat, a charismatic young hunter struggling for the affections of Atuat, who has already been promised to Oki, the son of the camp's leader. When Atuat chooses Atanarjuat, Oki seems to accept it, but later events turn his anger and hatred into a murderous spite. This story, as passionate and primal as any film noir, is framed by the daily lives of the Inuit--a struggle for survival that is both simple and vivid, foreign yet immediately understandable. No one in the cast is a professional actor, but the performances are direct and compelling, telling a story that is both epic and intimate. --Bret Fetzer
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