After the apocalyptic death and destruction of World War II, entire nations struggled to start anew amidst the physical and psychological rubble. There was a steady outpouring of stories that took place in settings that were barren, stripped down, inhospitable.
The most famous of these was probably Waiting for Godot, whose stage decoration is described thus: "A country road. A tree. Evening." Such a landscape is itself a statement about the stark reality of existence, one shared by countless postwar movies and books whose characters inhabit deserts, empty beaches, mountain fortresses, bombed-out cities and impoverished villages.
You get a modern, upmarket version of this kind of arid landscape in Islands, a teasingly spare, slow-burn drama by German filmmaker Jan-Ole Gerster, here working in English. Set on Fuerteventura — one of Spain's Canary Islands, off the coast of North Africa — it lures you in like a conventional thriller then turns into something less predictable.
Looking a bit like Peter Fonda in his scruffy days, Sam Riley plays the quietly sympathetic Tom, a broken-down tennis pro who has ended up on Fuerteventura, a small island that's basically a collection of beaches, volcanic slag and craggy cliffs.
Tom gives tennis lessons to the guests of a luxury hotel that, in these surroundings, looks like the QE2 has somehow docked on the moon. Although his life might appear enviable — days in the sun; nights of dancing, drinking and women eager to party — he wakes up with the daily hangover of a man trying to convince himself that purgatory is paradise.
This changes when he starts giving tennis lessons to Anton, the young son of a rich married couple — the sophisticated Anne (that's Stacy Martin), a former actor, and Dave (played by Jack Farthing), a jerk businessman who specializes in a kind of bullying friendliness. Tom enjoys teaching Anton, and starts doing the family favors.
Anne and Dave are dangerously unhappy, and for those of us raised on Double Indemnity and Body Heat, we start waiting for the inevitable torrid sex scene and murder. And we worry for Tom, a decent guy who Riley gives a very nice vibe.
As Tom guides them around the island and gets pushed into taking Dave out clubbing, I wondered if he'd never seen a film noir. Otherwise, he'd know he's heading for trouble. Eventually that trouble comes: Dave disappears, the cops are called in, and it turns out Anne hasn't been entirely forthcoming.
Yet what makes Islands good is that it's not just another reheated noir. As our anxiety mounts — a feeling accentuated by the musical score — we begin to pick through the story's sly hints and possible clues. Have Tom and Anne actually met before? Why exactly is Tom drawn to Anton? Why is he bending over backwards for people he barely knows? Is he hoping to escape his spiritual solitude by throwing himself into the search for the missing Dave?
The movie makes us feel Tom's — indeed everyone's — isolation; it's not for nothing the film is called Islands. Gerster's carefully calibrated images show how the characters are defined by the meaningless beauty of the island — where even the sunset can feel a bit cold — and the meaningless pleasures of holiday reveling: swatting tennis balls back and forth, guzzling drink after drink, throwing one's music-fueled arms toward the sky in the disco. Over and over and over again.
In its blend of high-art style and pulp crime story, Islands is a nifty piece of what we might call Existential Pop. While both its style and story clearly suggest a male riff on Michelangelo Antonioni's great film L'Avventura — whose heroine goes looking for a mysteriously vanished woman — Islands also made me think of Houellebecq's nifty novella Lanzarote, about an alienated hedonist's search for meaning on another of the Canary Islands, and even The White Lotus TV series, where both tourists and hotel employees face crises that call their lives into question.
Now I'm happy to say that, for all its metaphysical overtones, Islands doesn't end on one of those unresolved enigmas that leaves you shrieking at the screen. We learn everything we need to know, and so does our hero. Realizing he's confused inertia for contentment, Tom finally grasps that the only way to stop his life from being empty is to do something meaningful to fill it up.
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