Atanarjuat [Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner] (2001)

(With French Subtitles, On TV, September 2021) In the pantheon of Canadian movies, Atanarjuat comes with exceptional acclaim. It was a global sensation upon its release, won Cannes’ Golden Camera award, ranked high at the Canadian box-office, heralded First-Nation filmmaking and regularly turns up on various Canadian best-of lists since then. There’s some substance behind its enduring popularity: As the first Inuktitut-language film, entirely shot in Nunavut, it represented a new branch of cinema even a century into the art form. It’s definitely something fresh to watch even today: taking us back thousands of years and into the arctic circle, it has immense documentary value in showing the traditional Inuit lifestyle — from building igloos to icing sleds to preparing food, director Zacharias Kunuk takes pain to bring viewers somewhere else entirely. Some magnificent arctic imagery also shows something new, not merely ice floes but the land in the brief arctic summer, and other unusual vistas as well. In recounting an ancient legend, it also presents something quite unlike anything else. So far so good — but Atanarjuat can also suffer from its own hype. When the film was crowned “Greatest Canadian film of all time” by the Toronto Film Festival in 2015 (most likely a methodology artifact — every critic polled will have different opinions about the greatest Canadian movies, but many will include Atanarjuat somewhere in their top-10 list), it also exposed itself to some contrarian opinions. It’s not as if the film is perfect, or has aged as well as you’d think. Shot at the dawn of digital cameras as a viable filmmaking tool, Atanarjuat now looks uglier than ever on high-definition screens. The low resolution and blown-out picture are now actively irritating in that it places an obstacle between what’s being shot and how it’s shown to viewers. The muddy, indistinct shapes of the image are disappointing, and the quality of the camera movement breaks immersion. This is not helped by a directing style that is better intentioned than fluid: strange and inappropriate choices in close-ups, medium shots and long shots frustrate more than they charm, and the film seldom flows well from one image to another. But it’s the narrative quality of the film that frustrates more than anything else: coming from a different storytelling tradition, the narrative feels jumbled and frankly interminable at more than two hours and a half. The acting is tough to gauge — except when moments of it feel intensely annoying. There are still some great moments, though: Lead actor Natar Ungalaaq deservedly earns our respect for being willing to run for extended periods of time barefooted, bare-naked (with plenty of frontal nudity) on wet ice in the film’s action climax. There’s a lot more sex and violence to Atanarjuat than you’d guess, and it’s hard to put into words the wonder of watching something so alien on-screen. But at the end of it (bruised and battered from the extended running time and the film’s shaky narrative drive), I found myself more disappointed than exhilarated from it all. Landmark film? Absolutely. Great film? Let’s talk.