One Tribeca Film Festival 2015 film I wasn’t able to catch before the awards ceremony was Virgin Mountain from writer/director Dagur Kári. However, the feature was not only awarded the festival’s Best Narrative honors, but also awarded Best Screenplay and star Gunnar Jónsson was awarded the Best Actor award. With that praise, I knew I had to see Virgin Mountain before the end of the festival. I’m glad I did — Virgin Mountain is a moving character piece that features a memorable character facing challenge after challenge in his life.
Fúsi (Jónsson) is a middle-aged baggage handler at an airport who stills lives with his mother. As the film’s title implies, Fúsi is a massive human being, which makes him an easy target for teasing by his co-workers. The fact that Fúsi is introverted does not help matters, and he spends much of his time working on models of World War II battles. Fúsi’s mother’s boyfriend gives Fúsi a cowboy hat and a gift certificate to line dancing classes as birthday presents in the hope that he might meet a woman. Though Fúsi flakes out on attending the first class, he ends up meeting Sjöfn (Ilmur Kristjánsdóttir), an equally-lonely woman who has dreams of owning a flower shop. Since Sjöfn has her own issues as well, the two soon experience the ups and downs of a romance as Fúsi attempts to finally find the happiness that has alluded him all of his adult life.
One one hand, Virgin Mountain sounds like a dramatic take on the basic premise The 40 Year Old Virgin, and while that is true it is also an extremely effective human drama. Jónsson inhabits the part with such heartbreaking detail. Fúsi has a perpetually sad look on his face, which only morphs into sad confusion when he doesn’t understand why people mistreat him or misunderstand his intentions. It’s very telling that during a dance class the instructor tells Fúsi — who is not exactly light on his feet — “You can’t just move to your own beat.” Though Fúsi has spent his entire life seemingly quietly content with his life, Sjöfn represents the only opportunity he’s ever had to live something resembling a “normal” life. When a little girl who lives in the same apartment building sees him carrying a remote control car and she asks if it’s for his son, Fúsi doesn’t know how to answer.
Kári often examines Fúsi in close-ups, which hides his enormous girth and forces the viewer to look at his face. Because he doesn’t say much, it gives the audience an opportunity to feel Fúsi’s emotions. Kári doesn’t focus on Sjöfn as closely, which means that some of her reactions to Fúsi are somewhat unexplained. But that makes these situations all the more heartbreaking because, much like Fúsi himself, we don’t understand why the happiness he seeks keeps eluding him.
Virgin Mountain reminded me of a much more serious version of Zero Charisma, and overall it is a very effective drama about loneliness and dealing with being an outsider. While at this point I think cinema is good for a while with movies about nerdy middle-aged virgins trying to fit in, Virgin Mountain examines that conflict most seriously.
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