It must be daunting adapting a successful book to cinema. Put too much of a spin on it and you risk offending the book’s devotees. Stay the course faithfully and you may have to listen to accusatory cries of slavishness. Vladimir de Fontenay, working from a 2009 collection from David Vann, is somewhere in the middle of both approaches. He doesn’t adapt Vann’s entire book, which contains connected stories. His film Sukkwan Island is adapted from a single tale in the book. As short story adaptation models go, Sukkwan Island is more Hearts In Atlantis than In the Bedroom.
Most of the film’s opening moments and as a whole take place in the brutal landscape of the Norwegian fjords, a setting from which cinematographer Amine Berrada extracts beauty. Roy has come to visit a cabin connected to his past. There must have been some heartache there, as pensiveness is etched on the young man’s face. Soon enough, the story of his past, along with its relation to the cabin, is revealed in a fleshy flashback.
As a boy, Roy once overheard a conversation his mother was having on the phone. She was obviously talking about him when she says the boy “needs a father figure”. That father figure turns out to be his actual father, Tom (Arnaud Swann). He wants to go on a trip and would like for the boy to come along, the fairly obvious theme of the trip being father-son bonding.
Once there, the harsh Nordic landscape splits their attention between that bonding and survival. And it’s not too long before, as some found out during Covid, living in constant proximity to other people, even those you love, can be a challenge. It’s apt that we see Roy’s dad reading from a book titled How to Survive Anything. He also talks a bit about how his union with his son’s mother fell apart. “Marriage doesn’t work out for some people. It is nobody’s fault,” he says.
De Fontenay gets the tone just right in these scenes featuring father and son. And in Arnaud Swann, he has cast an actor who, in peacetime, shows appropriately awkward affection for his estranged son, but as the times become increasingly brutal, seems to crumble face-first. The film’s drama depends heavily on him and he delivers.
And yet, somehow, this drama and its consequences do not seem sufficient for de Fontenay. Towards the end of the story, there’s a shift, and not in the most complimentary of ways. Quite conceivably, Sukkwan Island could do without its mise en abyme structure, becoming solely an account of the bonding process of a son and father. But perhaps in trying to reproduce for viewers what Vann, on the page, does for his readers, the film arrives at an unsatisfactory ending.
“We make the rules here. We do whatever we want,” one of de Fontenay’s characters says at some point. As a director, it is a sentiment that de Fontenay can relate to. His own rules work for much of this film. But one wishes that in dreaming up a conclusion, he had followed a different set of commands.
Director, screenwriter: Vladimir de Fontenay
Cast: Swann Arlaud, Woody Norman, Alma Pöysti, Ruaridh Mollica, Tuppence Middleton
Cinematographer: Amine Berrada
Editor: Nicolas Chaudeurge
Producers: Carole Scotta, Eliott Khayat, Caroline Benjo
Co-Producers: Synnøve Hørsdal, Petter Onstad Løkke, Jacques-Henri Bronckart, Tatjana Kozar, Mike Goodridge, Sydney Oberfeld
Venue: Sundance (World Cinema Dramatic Competition)
In English
114 minutes