Jasper Rees

Barking mad | 9 August 2018

This Icelandic film about a boundary dispute will doubtless be shown on two-and-a-half screens but it merits attention

Every so often there’s a news story in which neighbours quarrel over rampaging leylandii. The police are summoned, the case reaches the court, and whole lives are consumed by inextinguishable hatred. These nuclear tiffs are a Middle England staple. A boundary dispute is a border dispute writ small. Other European nations have watched their negotiable frontiers move around like a boundary rope on a cricket pitch. Surrounded by sea, we don’t have that in our DNA. And maybe Icelanders don’t either.

Under the Tree is a social comedy from Iceland in which the eponymous tree sits in the more southerly of two abutting gardens. The shade it casts thwarts the sun worship of Eybjorg (Selma Bjornsdottir). Hang on, sunbathing in Iceland? But let that pass: this is not a finicky film hung up on plausibility. Eybjorg is a blonde, Lycra-clad exercise freak and the second wife of Konrad (Thorsteinn Bachmann). She thus excites the deep suspicions of Inga (Edda Bjorgvinsdottir), her much older neighbour who tells her husband Baldvin (Sigurthur Sigurjonsson) that ‘that cycling bitch can easily move out of the shade’. Baldvin, a beta male, slopes off to choir practice at the first sign of aggro. Inga opts for escalation, throwing the bagged-up dog shit found in her garden back at Eybjorg. Soon Baldvin finds his tyres slashed. The tree surgeon, booked by Baldvin to appease the neighbours, is sent away again. After Konrad brings home a power saw, CCTV is installed to provide 24/7 surveillance for the endangered tree.

Inga would seem to be a common-or-garden harpy, but her mind has been turned by unresolved grief for a son who has long since disappeared, and probably killed himself. Her less-favoured other son Atli (Steinthor Hroar Steinthorsson) has just moved back in, booted out by his wife Agnes (Lara Johanna Jonsdottir), who discovered him masturbating to footage furtively captured while humping his ex-fiancée.

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