Review: The Juniper Tree Is a Plein-Air Wonder Ripe for Rediscovery

The film is a singular work of American independent cinema that speaks to a more global artistic sensibility.

The Juniper Tree
Photo: Arbelos Films

Nietzchka Keene’s The Juniper Tree is most often cited as Icelandic iconoclast Björk’s film debut, but its re-release offers an occasion to appreciate it as a singular work of American independent cinema that speaks to a more global artistic sensibility. Shot on black-and-white 35mm in Iceland (whose culture Keene studied at UCLA), the film is less enamored with the country’s geothermal wonders than it is with its sense of isolating emptiness, reflected here in the kind of rugged, hilly vistas where Max von Sydow once walked with Death. The Juniper Tree has a stark visual language composed of spacious static-camera setups that deftly weave foreground and background activity, and while cinematographer Randy Sellars’s images largely have an unshowy, plein-air clarity to them, they’re equally in touch with surrealism, as evidenced by a number of interjections of uncanny practical effects, to which legendary avant-garde filmmaker Patrick O’Neill contributed.

This dynamic of naturalism and mysticism is implied right out of the gate, as The Juniper Tree opens with an excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s 1930 poem “Ash Wednesday” before declaring its debt to the Brothers Grimm fairy tale with which it shares its title. Setting her adaptation in medieval Iceland, Keene takes the central ingredients from the fairy tale—a father and son reeling from the death of the family matriarch; the father’s remarriage; and the tension between the stepmother and stepson—but tweaks the story in significant ways, most notably in the overhaul of the stepmother character from a villain to a sympathetic antihero.

As the film begins, two vagrant sisters, Katla (Bryndis Petra Bragadóttir) and Margit (Björk), are seen wandering the countryside in the wake of their mother being put to death for witchcraft. Following in the woman’s footsteps, Katla employs her own sorcery on a widowed farmer, Jóhann (Valdimar Örn Flygenring), in order to secure his devotion to her and, in turn, the stability of her and her sibling. That the film matter-of-factly presents this and Katla’s ensuing acts of dark magic as practical means of survival in a land of callous and suspicious men suggests a feminist reworking of its folkloric source material, the same revisionist project that Catherine Breillat would extend to her films throughout the aughts.

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Leisurely in its narrative pacing, The Juniper Tree intercuts over what seems like a period of a few weeks between the various couplings that ensue from the new familial arrangement. Jóhann exhibits a doting and at times carnal affection for Katla when alone with her, but turns violently defensive whenever she’s in the company of his young son, Jónas (Geirlaug Sunna Þormar), who takes his private moments with Katla as opportunities to berate her for what he instinctively perceives as an inferiority to his deceased mother. While initially an understandable expression of a child’s grief, this line of attack gradually evolves into accusations of witchcraft, which renews Katla’s own trauma. Meanwhile, the ethereal Margit is experiencing visions of her dead mother in the hills around Jóhann’s hovel, information she shares with both Jónas and Katla separately—arguably to neither’s psychological benefit.

From here, the story takes a turn that, on the face of it, seems nightmarish but which Keene stages with a casualness that renders a character’s obscene act one of quiet, improbable dignity. To give the moment away would be to rob the uninitiated viewer of the eerie sense of disorientation that The Juniper Tree elicits as it veers gradually from chamber drama to phantasmagoria. Suffice it to say that the film lands upon a handful of staggering visual gambits: a grotesquerie that exists within an underwater ecosystem; Margit silhouetted by a crepuscular horizon as she watches a mysterious cloud formation swirl overhead; the two sisters descending into a cave behind a waterfall as rushing water increasingly fills the frame; and most remarkably, a crude evocation of a black hole emerging in a ghost’s bosom that resembles one of the primitive digital effects in Twin Peaks: The Return.

In the spirit of its citation of Eliot, it’s on the level of a visual poem that the film most often succeeds, and at a fleet 78 minutes its low-budget expressionism is sufficient to overcome an occasionally leaden dramaturgy. The domestic squabbles between Katla, Jóhann, and Jónas get repetitive quickly, in no small part due to hollow line readings from the cast that may or may not be by design, while Björk, with her pronounced dark eyes and seeming lack of self-consciousness, manages to make a vivid impression in a role that is nonetheless emotionally limited to soft-spoken diffidence and doe-eyed wonder. In any case, The Juniper Tree’s peculiar pedigree as an American indie fueled by European arthouse tropes and constructed with a flair for the avant-garde and the handmade marks it as a welcome rediscovery.

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Score: 
 Cast: Bryndis Petra Bragadóttir, Björk, Valdimar Örn Flygenring, Geirlaug Sunna Þormar  Director: Nietzchka Keene  Screenwriter: Nietzchka Keene  Distributor: Arbelos Films  Running Time: 78 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1990  Buy: Video

Carson Lund

Carson Lund's debut feature as a DP and producer is Ham on Rye. He also writes for the Harvard Film Archive and is the frontman of L.A.-based chamber pop duo Mines Falls.

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