A Letter From Helga

At first glance, the story in A Letter From Helga is a slight thing, simply a platform for much bigger emotions, but dig a little deeper and it’s full of hidden substance.

Adapted from the book by Bergsveinn Birgisson, this is a film as interested in the dynamics of romance as it is in romance itself, and one filled with a longing for a perfect love which its characters, no matter what they may sacrifice, find impossible to achieve. Perhaps it’s not surprising given the small size of their community at the tip of an obscure Icelandic fjord. This is a place where people make do with what they can find, the chances of finding a soulmate being slim.

When we meet them, Helga (Hera Hilmar) and Bjarni (Thorvaludur Kristjansson) have each already made one try at it. Helga hoped to find adventure with her husband Hallgrímur (Björn Thors), but he went on an adventure by himself – one involving significant quantities of alcohol. Bjarni found romance with wife Unnur (Aníta Briem) but once the flowers had faded there was little of substance left behind, at least from his perspective. Both have quietly gone on with life, submerging their misery in their different ways. Bjarni and Unnur are trying to have a child (though she has recently suffered a miscarriage). Helga is already a mother of two and loses herself in books. it doesn’t occur to them to look for escape in one another until rumours start flying around that they’re already having an affair.

The power of words is everywhere here. It’s in those stories which precipitate a real affair (with a lovely prelude in which he takes his ram over to her farm and they stand around awkwardly watching the sheep do their thing). It’s in the novels which have shaped Helga’s more expansive view of the world, and which inform the community’s tiny book group. It’s in the letter which Bjarni will receive decades later and keep for still longer before reading, frightened by the effect which he knows her words could have on him.

Helga is a creature of words. They have given her the power to soar beyond her small world and imagine one big enough to bear the weight of her soul. She longs for a lover who can be her equal in this, but with limited experience it’s all too easy to mistake sexual passion for real intellectual connection. Bjarni will fall short, unable to match her, unwilling to let go and expand his own imagination. At some point she realises that it is his potential she loves, and that perhaps more than anything else she will ever find – but can it be enough?

Wives in such stories are frequently presented as monsters or as pathetic, hopeless. Unnur is neither. The most complicated character in the film, she sees the affair coming before it happens, understands Bjarni throughout better than he does himself. The two women barely interact but one cannot help but feel that she is the person likely to understand Helga best. Her enduring commitment to Bjarni seems to speak to something which we can’t quite see but which is clearly visible to her. Side by side with the intense passion found more often in books, it’s a different kind of love, no less valid for being compromised.

Sometimes crashing sounds echo across the fjord – bombs being dropped out at sea, where a third of the world is engaged in the ferocious conflicts of the Second World War. One day a body washes up on the beach. Children are taken away – it’s agreed that this isn’t something they should see. Life in the community is a patchwork of forbidden things and painful gossip. In certain circumstances, it’s too much to bear, but Bjarni’s family has lived in Kolkustadír for nine generations and he cannot see beyond it. inevitably, the lovers are torn apart.

Fans of Birgisson’s novel will find it trimmed down considerably here, but its spirit is very much alive. Additional attention to Unnur rebalances it; we see little of Hallgrimur, but enough to recognise that he is not a monster, merely a man who could not do or be enough to let Helga thrive. Disappointment is everywhere here, but only makes that central passion sweeter, and likewise the bigger human thing which it represents. Jasper Wolf’s camera captures the smallness of the land against the arc of the sky, seeing its beauty but drawing the eye ever outward toward the horizon. A Letter From Helga is full of intellectual hunger and a lust for life which nothing can contain.

A Letter From Helga screened as part of the 2023 Glasgow Film Festival.