Film Review: “101 Reykjavik” (2000; On DVD)
This is a small film which tries to take on a big idea: the problem of human existence. The theme is set up in the first moments of the film when the main character, Hlynure, declares: “I’ll be dead after I die and I was dead before I was born. Life is a break from death.” If you missed the point, a caption flashes, in English, Cary Leibowitz’s compact observation: “U can’t B dead all the time.”

The film pursues this theme by tracing the life of Hlynure, a young man who still lives at home with his mother, refuses to get a job, and spends most of his time drinking, watching television, and engaging in meaningless (for him) sex. His routine is meant to show us a man reduced to a very primitive level. In Iceland, the state’s social network takes care of him from the cradle to the grave. Abandoned by his alcoholic father, Hlynure was supported by child support until he was sixteen, unemployment after that, and, when he’s old, the old-age pension will take care of him. He fails to see any reason to get a job or pursue anything more meaningful than watching pornography. He sleeps, eats, masturbates, and drinks.

But the women in his life seem to have other ideas. In fact, in this film it is the women who seem to be all about the work of civilization (contra Freud for women were the enemies of civilization). Hlynure describes a girl he’s had sex with as a woman “living alone in a three-bedroom flat that she’s trying to fill.” When the woman announces that she is pregnant, Hlynure refuse to be involved with the pregnancy at all, protesting that he wore condom, and, presumably, should not be held responsible for his progeny.

Things are complicated when his mother invites her Flamenco-dancing friend, Lola (Victoria Abril), to spend Christmas with them. Hlynure obsesses over Lola, and, one night, while his mother is away visiting relatives, he sleeps with her. When his mother returns from the trip she comes “out of the closet” and tells Hlynure that she is not only a lesbian, she and Lola are in love.

While Hlynure debates whether or not he should tell his mother about Lola’s infidelity, he discovers that Lola his pregnant. While Hlynure’s mother knew that Lola was going to seduce someone with the aim of getting pregnant, she is apparently unaware that Hlynure is the father.

Hlynure then broods over the absurdity that he is to be the father of his stepfather’s (i.e. Lola’s) child who will also be his brother, i.e., his mother’s (adoptive) son. His only reaction seems to be greater and greater despair, but in the end he finds a place for himself, in his mother’s home, but now with a job and a purpose: to help care for his son/brother.

So the idea seems to be that the purpose of life is to perpetuate more life, and in this film only women seem to be aware of that. At one point Hlynure complains that the local night club is just a “waiting room for the venereal disease clinic,” a place that his “haunted by the ghosts” of aborted fetuses.

The film is certainly not a philosophical tour de force, leaving us, apparently with the idea that the only purpose in life is to perpetuate life, but if the life we perpetuate is equally meaningless, what is the point of perpetuating it?

To this end, I find my summer reading project—the works of Alfred North Whitehead—to be a refreshing alternative. For Whitehead there really does seem to be a meaning to life, though this meaning is not circumscribed by any particular teleology, found in his notion of enjoyment. Experience, and the enjoyment of experience, is the meaning of life, and Hlynure’s aimless activity throughout the film represents a kind of truncated experience, truncated because truncates it, denying himself opportunities for maximizing enjoyment by seeing the way is activities are related to all the events in the universe.

Still, this small film is beautiful in its own way, wonderfully paced, and, though this is not its aim, gives the viewer a wonderful slice of life in Reykjavik.