Director Bille August‘s ‘Smilla’s Sense of Snow‘ (1997) should have had every reason to be a standout film. The script brings a successful novel by Peter Høeg to the big screen. The story belongs to a cinematographic genre – techno-thriller – which is successful with the public. The cast is excellent and includes a female star – Julia Ormond – then in the prime of her career, who is given a complex role that combines action with psychological analysis of a very interesting character. And yet, the film fails to live up to its potential and ambitions. What starts out interesting and complex ends up like another action movie. As if something was lost along the way.
The film’s heroine, Smilla Jaspersen, is half Inuit, originally from Greenland. Her mother died when she was 6 and she was raised by her father. A brilliant mathematician and ice researcher, she still can’t find her place either in her career or in her personal life. At 30+ years old, she is single and out of work, when a strange accident happens in the apartment block in Copenhagen where she lives. A little fatherless boy from an Inuit family, whom Smilla had befriended, falls to his death from the roof of the house. The incident is classified as an accident, but many details do not seem right to Smilla. What was a child suffering from dizziness and fear of heights looking for on the roof? If this was just an accident, why was he being autopsied and sampled for biopsy? The questions she asks seem to be uncomfortable for the police but also for the company that had hired the boy’s father, a big concern that dealt with mineral exploration in Greenland. A neighbor who seems like a decent man, but whose intentions are not clear to the woman, is also interested in the same case. How does he appear in key moments and places of the investigation? Maybe he just looks for an opportunity to start a relationship with her?
The story gets complicated, but it remains interesting as long as the investigation reveals details that are also related to the Inuit identity and the woman’s relations with her neighbor, with her father, with the investigators who try to remove her from the case. From a moment on, however, the events become less and less believable. Smilla and her new friend find themselves embroiled in a James Bond-esque plot and fighting a global corporation willing to commit any crime to achieve its goals. Their transformation into action movie heroes is a little believable. The script that adapts the plot of the book is probably also to blame. For the director Bille August the great success may have come too soon, and after the Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for the best foreign film (received in 1988), expectations were always high. About two-thirds of the way through the film I think he manages to maintain interest and create a Nordic thriller atmosphere, enhanced by the icy landscape that covers Copenhagen and envelops everything in Greenland. The director is also helped by the actors, especially Julia Ormond and Gabriel Byrne, who play the main roles. The whole cast manages to reproduce the Scandinavian atmosphere well (at least it seemed to me) even though it is an international cast. If Ann Biderman, the screenwriter who adapted Peter Høeg’s novel, had resisted the temptation to include adventure movie pyrotechnics, I think ‘Smilla’s Sense of Snow‘ would have been better. But even so, it’s a film worth watching.