Word: smilla
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...Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg. Denmark's exploitation of Greenland's mineral resources seems an unlikely background for a detective thriller about the mysterious death of a six-year-old Inuit boy. Unlikely too is the investigator, Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, a woman caught between the native Greenland culture of her hunter-tracker mother and the well-appointed world of her Danish father, a physician and scientist. Like Ross Macdonald in his Lew Archer novels of darkest California, Hoeg creates an unfamiliar but palpable world that steadily envelops the reader...
What will surprise everyone is the dry iciness, the burning coldness of Ormond's Smilla. Up to now she has trafficked largely in vulnerability--melting in Legends of the Fall, perhaps a shade too winsome in Sabrina. Here, she is all contained fury, except for the flashes of anger and contempt that burst without warning from the darkness within. It's not exactly diva acting such as we used to get from the great ladies of the movies' classic era. She achieves her effects with less obvious calculation. But like a Barbara Stanwyck or a Bette Davis, she takes...
...identification with the child is more than that of one solitary with another. He was born in Greenland, as she was. Both of his parents are Inuits, natives of the region, as her mother was. Both have lost parents at an early age. And now, like Smilla before him, the boy finds himself trying to make a new life in Copenhagen, which to them is hardly the Danny Kaye song's "friendly old girl of a town." August makes us see it as dark and claustrophobic, stressing its contrast to the bright and limitless horizons of the land, essentially untouched...
...Smilla comes home from work and finds Isaiah dead, the victim of a fall from their building's rooftop. An accident, the police insist. A murder, her intuition tells her. This suspicion is confirmed by the increasingly hostile behavior of the authorities as she begins to investigate the case. It will come as no surprise to devotees of the paranoid thriller--is there any other kind nowadays?--that the victim is accidentally privy to information that threatens the secret plans of a powerful mining corporation to exploit and sully Greenland's purity. It will come as no surprise to them...
...duty of a lot of good character actors to keep driving her in the opposite direction, toward the end of her very taut tether. It is the very great pleasure of this movie (well written by Ann Biderman) that its truly haunting suspense derives not from Smilla's conflict with her external enemies but from her own demons...