Review: Against the Current Conventionally Attests to a Kayaker’s Trans Journey

Although Iceland is often seen as an LGBTQ-friendly place, Icelandic kayaker Veiga Grétarsdóttir’s growth into her trans identity was a dreadful process. She lived a double life, and lived them both badly. Married with children, she hid her cross-dressing clothes in unusual places, such as secret cavities she hollowed out in her car, and was in a perennial state of agony over the possibility of being caught. She drove fast, fixed vehicles, and hunted animals, as if to choke her womanhood to death with the weight of all things stereotypically masculine. When that wasn’t enough, she tried to kill herself.

Óskar Páll Sveinsson’s documentary Against the Current alternates between telling Veiga’s story mostly through conventional talking-head testimonials of Veiga, her ex-wife, family, and friends, and documentation of her 103 days spent at sea circumnavigating Iceland on a kayak alone and against the currents. Throughout, Sveinsson makes an unusually parallel contrast, and with repetitive insistence, between kayaking and transitioning, collaging horror stories of Veiga’s past with a strangely quick-paced portrayal of her expedition that never gives us a real sense of what it feels like to endure the against-the-current movement toward survival, and maybe even happiness, that the kayaking is so obviously meant to literalize.

Veiga makes her way past one astonishing Icelandic landscape after another, as if hoping to paddle her traumas away after gender-confirmation surgery, while we hear accounts of her suffering, anxieties, experiences with doctors, and fantasies of castration. And through it all, we never really get a sense of trans time, with its stop-and-go rhythms, nonlinear paths, detours, checkpoints, and the slowness of waiting, the sheer boredom of being stuck.

The film’s persistent score and the excessive slickness of the drone shots of Icelandic landscapes both mask the cuts and seams of trans existence, its out-of-joint-ness, keeping Veiga from exercising her agency as a trans subject. GoPro-style perspectives of her circumnavigation and video diary shots are kept to a minimum, as if Sveinsson were more worried about giving the film a Netflix-friendly glossy carapace than allowing for some sort of authenticity to emerge and take over the film, queering its structure and form.

Trapped in an over-aestheticized world of predictable parallel editing and drone and Steadicam shots, Veiga can only be the object of a series of gazes: medical, cinematic, and cis-centric. The only moment when Against the Current tries an unabashed jump cut is when Veiga shows the camera that her kayaking outfit is made for men: It has a frontal zipper, but she’s no longer “equipped” with a “dong,” so she has to wear a diaper.

A crucial calculation for filmmakers capturing the lives of those whose conditions they ignore in some fundamental way is, of course, allowing for the specificity of their subjects to speak back to the film. The strategy of allowing a film’s subject to affect its storytelling is at the core of recent depictions of trans life, such as Claudia Priscilla and Kiko Goifman’s Tranny Fag, whose assemblage (from stage performances to vlog-like interventions) makes it seem like it was directed by the film’s very muse, Brazilian rapper Linn da Quebrada. It’s also a structuring element of Zohar Melinek Ezra and Afek Testa Launer’s webseries Spectrums, whose editing embodies the discontinuities of trans trajectories by playing up the jump cut.

Against the Current’s style, by contrast, imposes a generic visual language onto a subject who’s anything but generic. This means that instead of speaking freely, Veiga is induced to merely respond. And Sveinsson’s prompts too often come down to the same old questions that only leave room for trans people to provide an account about their lives based on pain, genitalia, mourning, and “passing” as some kind of inevitable destination.