Film Review: Borgríki / City State

Ólafur Jóhannesson (or Olaf de Fleur) and his mates at Poppoli Pictures have had a very productive career since they came onto the scene in 2004 with the documentary Blindsker, about the Icelandic pop star Bubbi Morthens. Since then they have made an average of nearly one movie per year (which is quite a lot for Icelandic filmmakers, the average is more like one every 3-4 years). Most of these films are documentaries but there are also a couple of feature films, Stóra Planið (The Higher Force) and Kurteist Fólk (Polite People), the latter which premiered earlier this year. Both of these films were comedies and most of their documentaries have been rather humorous, but their newest movie, Borgríki (City State), is a different beast altogether. It’s a very serious crime thriller describing the criminal underworld of Iceland. It’s also very different from most Icelandic thrillers, as they have usually been some sort of whodunit murder mysteries. People get killed in this movie but there’s nothing mysterious about the killings.

City State tells the story of four people, a serbian mechanic, a crime kingpin, a corrupt cop and a young, female member of the Icelandic equivalent of the SWAT team. Their lives interconnect through a series of incidents which start with a small, but valuable, bag of drugs getting stolen.

It’s very nice to see a movie like this getting made in Iceland, it’s in many ways similar to such films as The Departed and Traffic, and thankfully it largely succeeds in being a badass crime flick describing the harsh reality of the Icelandic criminal underworld and the work of Icelandic policemen dealing with this underworld.

Most of the actors do a really good job in this film and do a lot for the movie. Ingvar E. Sigurðsson is solid as usual, managing to make his crime boss character both pathetic and rough. He’s a bad dude but you also manage to understand where he comes from. The standout here, though, is newcomer Zlatko Krickic (who some might recognize from de Fleur’s documentary Africa United) who’s quite excellent as a Serbian mechanic out for revenge. Krickic has no formal acting training, but it doesn’t show here as he outshines even veterans as Ingvar. His character is a real badass, a former soldier who doesn’t mind killing people to get what he wants, but he still appears sympathetic, thanks in part to solid writing, and Krickic draws out his humane side. Sigurður Sigurjónsson, who’s mostly known in Iceland as a comedian, shows a new side of him here, and is brilliant as a corrupt and pathetic police officer. He fully succeeds in separating his character from the silly characters he’s known for playing in comedy shows in Iceland. It’s also worth mentioning that Jonathan Pryce has a small role in this movie, which he delivers with his usual brilliance.

Pretty much all the characters in this movie operate in a moral gray area, the cops can be just as bad as the criminals and the criminals have their good sides and reasons for doing what they do. Nothing is just good or just bad in the world the film shows us, everything is a little bit of both.

Borgríki was made on a limited budget (it cost about 80 million Icelandic kronur, when usually a film like this would cost at least twice that) and that seems to have both helped and hurt the film. Most of it is shot in available light and much of it is also filmed in close-ups, where many scenes are just two heads talking in a cramped space. This makes for a very interesting visual style that gives the film a unique atmosphere. Even though the subject matter is familiar and there’s little truly groundbreaking about the story, essentially, the film feels somehow different. You don’t feel like you’re watching something you’ve seen a million times before.

But the film also has it’s flaws, and it’s very possible the filmmakers didn’t manage to do everything they wanted to do because of the low budget. Several characters, notably Ágústa Eva Erlendsdóttir’s character Andrea, are underdeveloped, and you wish more time had been spent on them. Some of the characters needed more gravity and the plot is a bit loosely tied together. There aren’t very many surprises in the narrative and it would have been nice to have another twist or two to shake things up a little more. When it’s over you want more and it doesn’t leave quite enough behind.

However, one thing that does really work in this movie is the dialogue. In a lot of Icelandic films, dialogue has been a problem as it’s often stiff and too formal, but this is not the case here. The conversations feel natural and are rarely stilted. It also helps that the acting here is never too “theatrical”, as it too often is in Icelandic movies.

One small problem with the movie is the sound. It’s unclear if it was either that the sound was turned up too high in the theatre, Háskólabíó, or that the sound mix wasn’t good enough, but some of the dialogue was a bit muddled and unclear, and at least one scene was really confusing because a couple of lines that seemed to be very important were just incomprehensible.

Final Verdict: A stylish, entertaining and very well acted movie that seems to give you an authentic view of the Icelandic criminal underworld. But the story lacks power and some of the characters are underdeveloped. But overall it’s a gripping and well made film.