Even if you don't find yourself head over heels in love with The Fast Runner, it's unlikely that you'll ever forget it. This is a movie that breaks all sorts of new ground (while sifting through some of the oldest ground on earth), and it's doubtful that you've ever seen anything remotely like it. I know I haven't.
The Fast Runner would have stood out in any year, but its appearance is especially welcome at a time when we've been inundated with critically acclaimed but basically unremarkable efforts like Tadpole and The Good Girl. Even if you don't manage to make it through the entirety of The Fast Runner's deliberately paced, nearly three-hour running time, I guarantee you'll remember what you've seen long after the last trace of Tadpole has faded from your mind. Personally, Tadpole has already been condensed to one or two key scenes in my memory, and as for The Good Girl, I'm already having a tough time remembering anything about that one (beyond Jennifer Aniston's Texas accent).
There's one thing that The Fast Runner shares with movies like Tadpole and The Good Girl. All of them have generated substantial hype, mostly because all have been the objects of considerable praise from high-placed (but often notoriously fickle) voices within the media. This particularly applies to The Fast Runner, and if it weren't so good, there would be a serious temptation to view the film as something of a flavor of the month.
The movie has a lot of big hooks going for it, and they're just the sort of hooks that make for great copy in newspapers and magazines — beginning with the fact that this motion picture is in effect the world's first Inuit production. Inuit — formerly known (in less PC times) as Eskimos — make up the vast majority of the cast and crew of this movie, which was shot in its entirety on a remote Arctic island inhabited for 4,000 years by nomadic Inuit.
The film's screenplay is the first ever written in the Inuktitut language. Beyond that, the movie's story is an epic and utterly faithful rendition of a timeless Inuit legend told and retold over the centuries. Between what's in front of the camera and what's behind it, The Fast Runner (also known as Atanarjuat) is about as authentic as it gets.
Happily, it's also about as good as it gets. At a time when a certain sameness and even predictability is found in all too many of even our best films, The Fast Runner has a strong, singular sense of itself. This is first-class filmmaking in the best possible way — which is to say that it's extreme and original without trying to be either. Inevitably, there are precedents to The Fast Runner, but that doesn't take anything away from the sheer power and uniqueness of the film.
Anybody with a decent knowledge of film history will find it all but impossible to avoid comparisons with Robert Flaherty's groundbreaking proto-documentary Nanook of the North, a film that gave the West its first up-close look at what was then called Eskimo culture. There's a real-time, almost documentary-like feel to much of The Fast Runner that can't help but evoke Nanook, but what we get here goes much further and cuts deeper.
The film begins like a dream (as do so many good films). We're placed on a vast, flat, blindlingly beautiful expanse of snow and ice, sometime around the beginning of the first Millennium, where we become witnesses to what appears to be a blood feud in the making. It's a good 20 minutes before we even realize that everything we've been watching is merely a prelude to the movie's main event, a setup in which an evil shaman appears and divides a once peaceful community into rival clans.
The Fast Runner is not exactly a creation myth, but as in most narratives of this sort, we get a natural order of things that's ruptured within the tale's first moments. All of the story's complications spring from this rupture, and much of our heroes' time is spent attempting to mend what's been put asunder.
The basic story of The Fast Runner revolves around two brothers, Amaqjuaq (Pakkak Innukshuk) and the swift-footed, younger Atanarjuat (Natar Ungalaaq). Atanarjuat has a thing for a local beauty named Atuat (Sylvia Ivalu), even though she's already pledged to a nasty-tempered type called Oki (Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq) — who, as it turns out, is infected with the same evil spirit that has apparently been contaminating his family for generations. After a wonderfully strange ritual battle inside a massive igloo-cum-Thunderdome, Atanarjuat wins Atuat's hand, although not without a mess of bad feelings on the part of Oki and his clan, feelings that linger throughout the rest of the movie.
It's probably already clear that it's a bit tough to discern the players in The Fast Runner without a score card. The characters' names don't exactly trip off our Yankee tongues and many of them sound pretty much the same to our hopelessly untrained ears. Our confusion is compounded by the fact that everybody dresses identically (all bundled up), has roughly the same coloration, hair length and many of the same incidentals (elaborate but similar feline facial tattoos for the women, snot-caked beards for the men).
Once you get past that, The Fast Runner becomes surprisingly easy to follow. The movie creates a totally believable environment and then seduces us into it. After spending some time with Amaqjuaq, Atanarjuat and Atuat, telling everybody apart becomes a breeze.
To maximize mobility under daunting conditions, The Fast Runner was shot on relatively easy to handle digital video (transferred to widescreen 35mm). It's a film of austere but enormous beauty. The landscape is as much a central character as any one human in the movie, and the film is filled with haunting imagery and an endless variety of blinding white light. It is an elemental movie if ever there was one, dominated by shots of earth, water, wind, the occasional fire and a whole lot of ice.
Much of what we see seems to occur in something very close to real time (partially accounting for the movie's documentary-like feel, as well as its slightly unwieldy 172-minute running time), and the film abounds in carefully observed details of 11th century Inuit life. Out attention is constantly directed to hands at tasks — cutting, lifting, fanning fires — to the stitching on a garment, to the snot frozen on the upper lip of an infant, to the tending of the seal oil perpetually burning in the center of a room.
This is a movie about the simple pleasures and pains (primal, if you will) of life. Moments of great delicacy and raw emotion revolve around the consumption of fresh meat (walrus heart is a preferred treat), a drink of water, a successful hunt, the promise of sex (if you're patient, there's a great sex scene at the movie's one-hour mark), a shared song.
Life is harsh for the people in The Fast Runner, but also strangely sensual and satisfying in the most fundamental way, much like the film itself. Lest you begin to think the movie is all Nanook-like ethnic folksiness, there's plenty of juicy, bad behavior here too. Hollywood melodramas don't have anything on The Fast Runner's universal tale of secrets, lies, lust, murder, rape, revenge and seal blubber.
There's a lot more here than just three hours of snow and silence. And like so many of the best myths and action movies, it all boils down to a white-knuckle mano e mano. This one is between Atanarjuat and Oki, and it plays out on a stark, icy wasteland as foreboding and poetically resonant as the desert scenario at the end of a very different sort of epic, Von Stroheim's Greed.
Many of the events, rituals and relationships in The Fast Runner are explained in a manner that's cursory at best, so there's apt to be some confusion among non-Inuit audiences (i.e., just about everybody) when watching the film. Similarly, outside of a bit of musical sweetening, the movie makes few concessions to conventional filmmaking, and a goodly number of viewers will almost certainly find The Fast Runner far too, um, exotic for their tastes.
The film even goes so far as to populate itself almost exclusively with nonprofessionals, so that it never crosses our minds that we're watching trained actors performing for us. We really come to believe that the people up on the screen are simply being themselves, and it's actually a shock when the final credits roll and we see behind-the-scenes footage of the actors fooling around in modern dress. It's a shame the film's spell had to be broken in such a rude way, but, even at 172 minutes, all spells have to end sometime.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Aug 28 – Sep 3, 2002.