13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A journey to a place that's not on any map, May 23, 2004
It has been seven years since Atushi Hirata's parents died in an accident in Iceland. Hirata is now a successful young executive who has been instrumental in making a good profit for his company. He's ready to take a golfing holiday in Hawaii, but is compelled by obligation to perform the memorial rites for his dead parents by some river near Staadelfyr. Once he does so, according to his grandfather, their spirits can rest in peace. Hirata, like his late father, isn't exactly a spiritual person, but he decides to get this over with, and as Hirata hates the cold weather in Tokyo, he definitely won't be thrilled to spend three weeks in Iceland, a land of snow, cold, and sheep.
His impressions of the country go from "very cold" to "strange," but he does meet some interesting people and is reminded time and again of the way people look at death and God. Among the warmest and most positive is Laura, someone who's a "funeral collector," going to funerals, taking photos, notes, and taping the music, and she is moved by the singing and the candles. She finds death as something joyous, the end of life on earth being the beginning of a beautiful new life. She is for his family obligation, saying "how else would we learn to grieve?"
The other is an old man in his sixties who becomes his guide, a Virgil to his Dante, and given the bleak cold of Iceland, the analogy is kind of appropriate. And for Hirata, Iceland might as well be the innermost core of hell. Another mythology analogy is the bridge Hirata has to cross and the river where the rites are performed, the bridge symbolizing the journey from the living to the dead, and the river akin to the River Styx, the river of the dead.
Most of the people he meets are kind and help him out, as when his car's spare tire goes kaput. He also has a supernatural encounter with a mysterious woman who helps him when his car motor gets frozen, and that is quite a surprising scene. His worst experience comes from picking up Jack and Jill, a married American hitchhiking duo. Jack is coarse, brusque and extraverted, and Jill who complains a lot, but things get uglier as time goes on. The one thing Jack says that relates to Hirata's quest is when he thinks Iceland is God's country, quiet, the endless wastes of snow. Definitely a contrast from the noisy, neon-lit, crowded, smog-ridden streets of Tokyo.
The concept of a hero's journey is played out here. He's initially a creature of the soulless corporation, where tradition is seen as superstition and bad for business. Yet as his father tells him in a videogram they sent, success is important, but that, and any distance should not weaken the bond between parents and children. And thus does Hirata bridge that distance, having never done anything for his parents when they were alive.
Note: when Hirata shows his guide the implements for the memorial rites, he holds up something called senko, whose equivalent in English he doesn't know. Well, senko are incense rods. Also, let me break down the word Hirata uses for "hangover," futsukayoi: futsuka means second day, yoi means inebriation.
A wonderful movie that examines spiritual renewal in a person. Hirata's cold fever eventually breaks, and as he says at the end of the movie, "sometimes, a journey can take you to a place that's not on any map."
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
winter wonderland, May 10, 2001
I traveled to Iceland this past March, and watching Cold Fever made me positively nostolgic for its wintry landscape and sense of mysticism which this film so gorgeously captured. The landscape seemed to function as the main character in the film, unyielding and rich with stories and secrets. I particularly enjoyed the array of bizarro characters in Cold Fever - the funeral collector, the sock puppet wielding Americans, the Icelandic cowboys and caroling truckers - peppering the film's themes of alienation and ritual with wonderful humor. Anyone who has been to Iceland can attest to its power and eccentricities. From the moment that Atsushi arrived at the Reykjavik airport and took the flybus to the Blue Lagoon, it was as if I was there all over again. I recommend Cold Fever to film lovers everywhere, and especially to those of you who dream of going to Iceland.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A mystical film, July 11, 2000
By A Customer
A couple of things that I keep thinking about after seeing this film...first, in so many reviews there is mention of the "weird ritual" performed by the cab driver. It looked an awful lot like a Christian nativity play to me, with the cab driver playing the role of Joseph...the only thing "weird" would be the abrupt manner in which he stopped to do so--but I do concede that the whole darn thing would be pretty strange to the jet-lagged and bewildered Atsushi. I too appreciate the look at European culture through a Japanese character's eyes, especially when he's saddled with the horrible American couple, Jack and Jill. But to get to my main point, which is that I saw the latter part of the film as his own journey to the spirit world. There are so many references in the film to spirits, Icelandic and Japanese, and the discussion in the cabin about the spirits centering on the volcanic islands of the two countries is particularly intriguing. What if Atsushi has died at some point along the way? Are the characters he encounters fellow spirits, previously mortal or otherwise? Or are they humans with whom he is making contact as a spirit? I have had a wonderful time trying to figure out at which point he may have died and continued his journey after his death. The comparisons to Jarmusch, especially the film Dead Man, would be even more resonant here... And as a postscript, I found the soundtrack beautiful and haunting, a perfect complement to the cinematography.
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