Isuma’s new flick gets respectful, but not rave reviews

ARTHUR JOHNSON

It must have been a bittersweet occasion for Norman Cohn.

Last week, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, the feature film to which he and partner Zacharias Kunuk have devoted the last couple of years of their lives, had the honour of opening the Toronto International Film Festival.

The Journals of Knud Rasmussenis based on an episode from the famous journal made by the Greenlandic-Danish ethnographer Knud Rasmussen during his Fifth Thule Expedition.

Rasmussen and his long-time companion, Peter Freuchen, travelled through most of the Canadian Arctic on that expedition, recording Inuit customs, songs and stories. The film focuses on their encounter in 1922 with the great Igloolik shaman, Awa, and his confrontation with the forces of Christianity.

But the movie failed to generate the buzz and excitement of their last epic, Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) which was screened at the Cannes film festival of France and went on to become a cult hit at art cinemas around the world.

Just before the opening, Cohn told The Globe and Mail that he would be leaving Isuma Productions, the Igloolik-based film company he and Kunuk have run for the past 20 years, to take stock of his life and build a cabin in the Eastern Townships of Quebec

Reviews of The Journals were respectful, but clearly, the critics did not feel that the movie was destined to attract much in the way of audiences.

The Globe and Mail’s Rick Groen had faint praise for the movie. “The Journals may not be a great movie, but it is a good movie, and the perfect one to open any film festival, especially a Canadian festival,” he wrote.

“The Journals is definitely no Fast Runner,” Groen said. “That film converted an ancient myth into a resonant epic as timeless as anything in Homer. By contrast [The Journals] is a static picture frozen at a precise moment in time — 1922, Igloolik, with an entire culture balanced on the cusp of irreversible and subsequently, disastrous, change.”

Now, Toronto’s alternative weekly newspaper, described The Journals as “a curious gala opener for the festival,” saying it was as “ethnically diverse and soberly artistic as last year’s opener, Water (a drama about a young girl consigned to a home for widows in 1930s India).

But Glenn Sumi of Now wrote that The Journals “is less powerful than [Water] and less absorbing than [Atanarjuat].”

“The writer/directors unspool their tale subtly and slowly, letting it emerge from various storytellers rather than in a linear fashion. This is initially disorienting but means that the characters accumulate texture.

“Once it’s over you’ll want to watch the early scenes again. Too bad Rasmussen and his Danish colleagues don’t come into better focus.”