blindness is
an attribute of youth
by Douglas Messerli
Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson
(screenwriter and director) Hjartasteinn (Heartstone) / 2016
In one of the most beautiful of landscapes,
the fishing village at the center of this truly moving feature film, is
nonetheless as bleak as it gets. In this small village everyone know everything
about one another, and it couldn’t be worse for poor teenage boy Þór (Thor, Baldur
Einarsson) whose two sisters Rakel (Jonina Thordis Karlsdottir) and Hafdís (Rán
Ragnarsdóttir) constantly push him into uncomfortable situations, including locking
him out of the house nude, filming their escapades. At least Hafdís is a
would-be poet, who attempts, from to time to time, to try to offer her family
deep insights, which her mother clearly indulges. If there is an underrated
character in this film, it is surely Hafdís, whose poetry her more frivolous
sister can endure.
The
bully boys of the village Ginger and his gay, always ready to make fun of Þór
and his deep friendship with Kristján (Blær Hinriksson), who everyone in this
village describe as a “couple,” and Þór’s own mother, Hulda (Nína Dögg
Filippusdóttir) who having been left by her husband has now begun seeing other mean and is
labeled as the town whore not only by family outsiders, but her children.
The
friendship between the two boys is deep, but they themselves are, as many
teenage boys confused about their own feelings, attempting to date to the local
girls, Beta (Dilja Valsdottir) and Hanna (Katla Njalsdottir), themselves in a
kind of girlish infatuation with one another that keeps them close together at
all times. But, it soon becomes clear that Þór is infatuated by Beta, while Kristján
keeps Hanna at a distance.
The movie, as most critics and commentators have argued, despite the
charms and beauty of this film, at two hours it is perhaps far too long. Yet I
argue that we need this time to experience the problems of both boys as they,
without even intending to, move off in other directions, fracturing their
intensely close friendship.
Kristján, plagued by a drunken father (Sveinn Olafur Gunnarsson), who is
also intensely homophobic, as nearly everyone is in this fishing village,
particularly causes problems for him, beating him for little reason. But even
that can’t be as upsetting for the boy than when he begins that he actually loves
Þór beyond their platonic friendship, and gradually comes to realize some
inadmissible to this world, that he is gay.
The pain and suffering it brings for Kristján, particularly when it becomes
more and more apparent that his more immature and re-adolescent friend is
actually straight and determined to have sex with Beta, not only willing to
have sex, but leading him on. Both of these young girls are for more sexually
aware, just as are Þór’s sisters, are for more sexually aware than the boys,
and serve strangely as almost metaphorical Eves, constantly tempting the boys
to do wrong, at one point even arguing that they should take advantage of the
neighbor Sven’s (Søren Malling) absence to borrow his horses and go on a long
overnight camping trip with them. Kristján attempts to refuse the temptation, but
with the two girls’ insistence and even Þór’s willingness to go along with
their desires, joins them, paying for it when Sven and his father come to enact
vengeance, taking off the horses and leaving the boys and girls to walk the
long distance back to the village.
At another moment, he challenges Þór to hook up to a harness, where he
dangles him by rope from a high cliff over the waters, forcing him to gather eggs
from the crannies of the cliff. Þór miraculously survives, but later admits
that he though that surely he would die.
The one failure of the film, pointed out by many critics, is that the
director chose the wrong figure upon which to focus.
As Farid-ul-Haq observes in his Movie
Review essay:
“While I enjoyed watching Heartstone,
I did feel that the story focused a lot on Thor. Considering the lengthy run
time, I would have appreciated knowing more about Kristjan and what he went
through after making a very impactful decision in the film. There’s a lot of
pain in Kristjan’s story and I would have preferred seeing more of it.”
Guy Lodge, in a slightly more complex reading of the film, writes:
“The boys’ conflicted, even hostile,
relationship to their environment is viscerally symbolized in a startling
opening scene, which in which 14-year-old Thor and Kristján), together with a
group of pals, savagely cull a school of fish in the local dock, plucking them
from the water and bashing their heads on dry land. This kind of hormonally
fevered destruction is what passes for fun in their sleepy maritime village,
where Thor lives with his single mother—who has recently, to her children’s
aggrievement, re-entered the dating scene—and two older, somewhat bullying
sisters. Kristján, meanwhile, weathers a consistent stream of abuse from his
hard-drinking dad.”
He later expresses a feeling quite similar to Farid-ul-Haq’s:
“Sympathetic as Thor’s journey to
awareness is, “Heartstone’s” languid, rollingly repetitive storytelling never
quite justifies its weighted focus on his character at the expense of his
friend’s more active anguish; a more judicious edit could place both in sharper
relief. (The question of how assured Thor is of his own nascent sexuality,
meanwhile, is only skirtingly addressed.) Later, Guðmundsson returns to the
fish motif in slightly more contrived fashion, as a bullrout is briefly taken
from the water and thrown back in, plummeting briefly before finding its gills.
Not everyone in this thoughtful, lyrical, slightly over-deliberate tour of a
beautiful teenage wasteland gets his own sink-or-swim moment of catharsis.”
In a sense, as excellent of a director as Guðmundsson is, it is as if he
has chosen to focus on the easier problem of a normative boy coming of age than
on what really might have been far more interesting and, of course, problematic
suffering of Kristján. Basically, he simply shows the more complex figure
sitting in night sweats as he suffers his slow recognition of his sexuality,
without letting us know just what it is he is truly feeling. This is
particularly important, when, at a part, Ginger and his friends, get hold of a
portrait painted by one of the girls of the two boys together, establishing
what Þór has long simply refused to admit to himself, that the two are still
perceived as a couple even as he has moved away actually now explored heterosexual
sex.
But blindness is always an attribute of youth, and while Þór seeks out
heterosexual fulfillment, his misses the one who actually deeply loves him. Gay
history, as many have pointed out, is filled with gay boy’s love of their
straight friend, who lose both friend and lover in attempts to reach our for
love.
It ends all too predictably with Kristján trying to commit suicide, and
fortunately failing. But since his parents cut him off from all visits, and now
plan to move to Reykjavík, he might as well be dead.
Without entry to his former friend’s house, Þór redeems himself, in
part, by asking the help of Hanna to distract Kristján’s cruel parents, while
he climbs through a window into Kristján’s room, asking whether he can visit
him in the capital city and giving him a kiss before he escapes.
If it is now quite clear that these boys have gone their different ways,
it is also quite apparent that they will never be able to forget one another
and their intense friendship. Kristján will clearly eventually go on to find
someone to love in the far more sophisticated and liberal Reykjavík. And
actually, it will be Þór who is left behind as a provincial, how without any
female friends and hardly any males one in the fishing village with a mother
marked by the community for her attempt to even explore love.
This is another film as beautiful as it is painful to experience. The
provinces certainly may have their beauty, but they lack the heart to be able
to accept their own citizens, who are punished for any deviation. Is it any
wonder that gay boys are almost always attracted to urban centers, leaving
behind the straight boys to live out their lives in closed-off lives.
Los Angeles, August 25, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(August 2026).
