David Wnendt’s bizarre art satire “The Sunlit Night” takes a metropolitan bohemian to Viking land.
In filmmaking as well as cooking, amazing effects can be achieved with contrasting ingredients. But what good is his feeling for counterpoint to the most daring chef if the taste buds of the guests just don’t want to open up to the unfamiliar? When David Wnendt’s first English-language film premiered at the American Sundance Festival in 2019, the local press literally went crazy. The German filmmaker had come up with some highly attractive ingredients in themselves. But that’s exactly what you didn’t really want to associate with each other.
First there is the lovable leading actress Jenny Slate. With indie comedies such as “Obvious Child” or the series “Girls”, she has risen to become a star beyond glamor over the past decade. With a few well-placed dabs, Wnendt places her film character Frances, an artist unsettled by a lack of recognition, in the New York bohemian era. But her parents’ home, who were quite art-loving, is hardly suitable as a ticket to the nifty gallery scene in Manhattan.
Everything in the film still fits like a fist on the eye: the odd father who charges his ungrateful work as a natural history illustrator of school books with the claim of a Bauhaus professor. And the lovingly over-the-top mother, who is constantly refurnishing and over-furnishing the tiny apartment with the same sense of art. The script by Rebecca Dinerstein offers precisely that pointed dialogue that one expects for a homely, exaggerated Jewish intellectual milieu. The American film press would probably have loved to watch this familiar film, but Wnendt suddenly turned his back on it. And replaces the attractive milieu with one that is no less attractive in and of itself.
The rest of the film takes place on the Lofoten island Vestvågøy, where Frances spontaneously leaves for an artist residence. Again, Rebecca Dinerstein’s script is based on a clever observation. Because the world is now teeming with dubious offers for artist stays abroad. A local artist (Fridtjov Såheim) is simply looking for a cheap helper to complete an elaborate application project: a dilapidated barn should shine with a yellow-patterned paintwork like a work by the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson.
This second film, in which the frustrated Frances goes from the rain in New York to the north Norwegian eaves, quickly becomes sympathetic to us. But then the third begins, in which the two mix.
As a matter of course, Frances meets a kind of male counterpart in the barren area, played by Alex Sharp: A lost-looking young New York baker’s son has traveled to the local Viking Museum. There he would like to bury his dead father according to the old Norse rite with the expert help of the costumed staff. He’s never been to his place of longing in his life, but what European doesn’t dream of New York on the other hand? After all, it was a Viking who was the first to head for the American continent.
From that point on, American film critics found it too much New York in the wrong place. The abstruse icing on the cake is the surprise appearance of Gillian Anderson as the boy’s rich mother with a Russian accent. It is precisely this absurdity that conjures up a wonderful menu from the disparate ingredients. It is also not the case that everything is now being mixed in a large bowl. The characters remain far too true to their own quirks for that.
Of course, this also applies to the local amateur Vikings. The Borg Viking Museum with its reconstructed nave is actually a tourist attraction, but it obviously had enough humor to be grotesque: It is a wonderful and perhaps not so absurd idea that its costumed staff continue to play Vikings outside of opening hours.
Even if this German-Norwegian co-production appears almost like an American independent film, it is a camouflage itself. Perhaps that is why it caught American criticism on the wrong foot. There is enormous freedom in this inner placelessness of a comedy about involuntary cultural nomads. Because the New York bohemian is not much more than a tourist idea today. In any case, the expensive galleries of Manhattan are not more authentic in this sense than in a reconstructed Viking house.
The Sunlit Night. D / Norway 2021. Director: David Wnendt. 91 Min.
