SONGS OF EARTH - Mark Reviews Movies

Songs of Earth, Strand Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 23, 2024

Director Margreth Olin spends a year with her parents, mainly her father, in Songs of Earth. There is such love here—for the parents, between this couple who have been together for decades, for the land surrounding them and the history that has accompanied it. As such, there is also a sense of mourning, because none of this can last forever, and this gentle, beautiful, and, at times, haunting documentary finds just the right balance of appreciation for the present, grief for the past, and worry for the future.

It's a meditative film, defined by exquisite shots of the Norwegian valley Olin, even though she no longer lives there, and her parents still call home, as well as the musings of Jørgen Mykløen, the filmmaker's father. He's 84 when Olin returns home to learn more about her family and the region, but you wouldn't know it.

Mykløen walks all the time—has as long as he can remember. In Oldedalen, walking means traversing steep hills, rocky waterfalls, and, in winter, the frozen river that flows from great glacier at the end of the valley. He does so happily, without complaint, and with a genuine sense of connection to nature and all that it has provided to him, his family, and all the generations that have come before him.

Most of the film, then, is about these hikes, which result in splendid shots of the region during each season of Olin's year-long stay. Mykløen, with a pair of walking sticks in hand, appears unstoppable on all this terrain, except for the moments he decides to pause—to contemplate his father and grandfather, what comfort and pain the landscape has brought to the people of this valley, and the contradictory nature of time, which is immense when considering the ebbs and flows of the Jostedalsbreen glacier, which he has seen consistently receding in just the past three decades or so, but so brief by comparison in any given human life.

He knows that, because his own parents are dead, and his own father, who lived to the same age Mykløen is now, was just a boy when his own father died. The only remnants of them are memories shared and passed along, as well as a single spruce tree that towers above the other foliage on a particular hill. Mykløen recalls his father visiting and sitting by that tree often but never speaking directly about the significance of what it meant to him.

He didn't need to, because the story of its origin says everything that needed to be said, and now reaching the end of his own life, Mykløen walks to that tree often himself. He understands it in the way his father did and his grandfather might have considered when he planted it. The spruce is now part of Mykløen's story, and in telling his daughter, it has become part of Olin's, too. In hearing it in this film, that story has become our own in a way, but such a notion—of memories fading and legacy hopefully continuing—is just the way of humanity.

The scope of this documentary is significant, then, despite it featuring only two subjects (as well as Olin behind the camera, although she stays out of the narrative, except to ask questions of her parents), being limited to this one—albeit vast—location, and consisting as much of sounds of the natural world as words spoken. It allows us to become familiar with the valley—its rolling hills and massive peaks and the flow of the river and the sheer scale of the glacier at end of and beyond this place—and with Olin's parents in close terms. Mykløen serves as our guide, and we hear stories of his family, of avalanches that killed entire families a century and more prior, of bearing witness to how the land tells us how the climate is changing, and of the unbreakable bond between him and his wife, Olin's mother, Magnhild.

She contemplates things, too, although of a more practical and personal nature. Magnhild knows she loves her husband and that he loves her, and that's all that matters. For all the beauty of this valley, there might be no lovelier moment in the film than one of the couple dancing together on wooden pier—a bonfire burning on a small point of land and the mountains towering above them in background. For all the melancholy of family history and pain of a list of whole families who died during one of those past landslides, there might be no sadder moment here than Magnhild suddenly saying that she hopes to die before her husband, because she cannot imagine a life without this man.

The film is quiet in all ways, except for the thunder of the glacier calving more and more frequently as the year progresses, and that includes the potency of its many ideas—about nature and time and the impermanence of both, especially when it comes to the human experience and our influence on the world—and its depiction of life, as well as love, in quaint but fulfilling solitude. Songs of Earth is about the balance that exists in all these things, too, and if grief for what has passed and worry for what might come are an integral part of this narrative, it is also optimistic about a future that might heed some of these lessons and grateful for what's right in front of us.

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