Review: L’Iceberg

Physical comedy in cinema, at least of recent vintage, so rarely rises above a kind of kick-the-cojones mediocrity (not, mind you, to completely devalue the groin shot—let us all now genuflect before The Simpsons’s “George C. Scott in Man Getting Hit by Football”), so the Belgian production L’Iceberg is a more than welcome breath of fresh air. Make that Arctic air, for that’s what inspires the impulsive actions of the film’s gangly protagonist Fiona (Fiona Gordon, suggesting Tilda Swinton by way of Olive Oyl), who goes off in search of the titular landmass after accidentally locking herself in a walk-in freezer. Something of a stylistic throwback to Jacques Tati’s stoic comedies of observation, L’Iceberg truly defies any attempts at encapsulation. Minimal dialogue and copious, often hilarious, rear-projection share space with stunning location footage, through which the film’s varied Belgian and French landscapes become gag-filled playgrounds of insight into the human condition. Ostensibly a deadpan examination of bourgeois selfishness, L’Iceberg rather drolly reveals itself—via touchingly amateurish bookends—as an Inuit tribeswoman’s (Lucy Tulugarjuk) recollection of how she first met her husband. Writer-directors Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, and Bruno Romy are clearly on the side of life’s outsiders (note the particularly inspired gag at a border check), perfectly willing to play fate’s fools so that an ineffable true love can find its fullest, most joyous cinematic expression.