Sects, Lies, and Videotape: Cold Fever (Friðriksson, 1995)

Special thanks to Hallvarður Jón Guðmunds for providing me with some much-needed cultural context. As always, I am open to suggestions for future topics (and thanks to those who have already done so). Leave a comment below or on Discord!

Welcome back to Sects, Lies, and Videotape, where we look at religion in film. So far, we have put the three Abrahamic faiths and the Abraham-adjacent religion of Zoroastrianism under the microscope. This month, still deep in winter, we are going a little further afield to the tiny island nation of Iceland, which provides the backdrop for an exploration of Shinto. Or possibly Buddhism. That’s right, we’re going to look at Cold Fever, widely hailed as the best Icelandic-Japanese road movie of 1995. It also set off the “Japanese businessman tours wacky island nation in a Citroën DS” film craze, whose only other entry is the 2000 Australian film The Goddess of 1967, featuring Rikiya Kurokawa and Rose Byrne (yes, that Rose Byrne, in her first leading role).

Cold Fever was the English language debut of Friðrik Þór Friðriksson (why did English ever ditch eth and thorn?), a director of some renown whose second feature, Children of Nature (1991), netted Iceland its first and only Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. The reason Cold Fever is mostly in English is baked into the premise. Atsushi Hirata (Masatoshi Nagase), a young Japanese businessman, is planning a two-week golfing vacation in Hawaii, but his plans are upended when his grandfather reminds him that the seven-year anniversary of his parents’ death is approaching, and he needs to perform the necessary ritual to appease their spirits.

Hirata must journey to the site of their death, and that site is a remote corner of Iceland, where they drowned in a river. Thus, Hirata begins an international odyssey armed with little more than a shaky command of English and a red Citroën DS that he buys in Reykjavík. It’s a road movie, and, like most road movies, everyone Hirata meets on his journey is insane. This includes other foreigners, most prominently the American couple Jack (Fisher Stevens) and Jill (Lili Taylor).

The companion that stood out the most for me, however, was Laura (Laura Hughes), a funeral-crashing photographer. When she learns of Hirata’s quest, she exclaims, “I knew you were someone who could appreciate ritual!”

“It’s a family obligation,” Hirata mumbles in reply.

“Oh, but rituals are always about obligation,” Laura replies. “How else would we learn how to grieve?”

Indeed, the spectre of death and the world beyond pervades this theoretically realistic movie. Ghosts are mentioned at the beginning, middle, and end. Iceland itself—covered from top to bottom in sheets of ice and snow—looks positively sepulchral. A professor once told me that all religion is a form of ancestor worship and, by that metric, this secular art film is the most religious movie I’ve yet to cover in this column. Let’s begin!

Sects!

The religion under discussion here is… whatever religion they have in Japan. The joke is that the Japanese are born Shinto, marry Christian, and die Buddhist, a syncretistic blend meant to imply that, in the end, the Japanese are not very religious at all. This is certainly true in comparison with, say, Iran. While Christianity is probably Japan’s third religion, Christians still only make up something like one percent of the population, and the popularity of certain Christian traditions (like church weddings and Christmas) is purely aesthetic.

Furthermore, Christianity is a latecomer, having arrived in Japan only in the sixteenth century, when kagemusha ruled the land. Shinto is the native religion, and Buddhism had installed itself so long ago that the Buddhist “grand inquisitor” in Shūsaku Endō’s Silence (and its most recent film adaptation) informs a Jesuit missionary without any irony that foreign religions cannot grow on Japanese soil. Japanese religion, historically, is Shinto and Buddhism, often at the same time.

Shinto and Buddhism have a longstanding truce where the two are distinct religions but tolerate the other religion putting its chocolate in their peanut butter. An average Japanese man or woman could readily identify as both Shinto and Buddhist. I say this because I have no idea which religion claims the ritual at the center (well, the end) of Cold Fever. Shinto is big on ancestor worship, and Hirata journeys to Iceland on behalf of his parents. But most funeral rites—per the joke—are Buddhist, whereas Shinto rituals are reserved for happier occasions such as weddings or birthdays.

Maybe Hirata does not know either. Like most of the Japanese population, he is not particularly religious, and neither were his parents. His grandfather impresses upon him his religious obligation, saying that Hirata’s father would have done the same out of a sense of duty. Hirata’s boss also expresses surprise that he is requesting an extension of his vacation from two to three weeks to accommodate the new destination. “I didn’t know you were so traditional!” he says, adding that superstition is not good for business. Hirata’s change of heart comes when he is practicing his putt in his apartment and inadvertently turns on a VHS tape of a New Year’s greeting from his parents, who request that he come and visit: “Distance should never weaken the bond between us.”

We see the ritual performed in its entirety at the end of the movie. Hirata even lays out and names the objects in advance: a memorial tablet, candles, a lighter, and a bottle of sake. The film only ever calls the ritual “memorial rites.” I tried to find out more about it through Internet sleuthing. The anniversary of death is called shōtsuki meinichi, but I suspect the ritual depicted in the film is the Buddhist nenki hoyo, the periodic rite held every few years until the forty-ninth anniversary of death, at which point the spirit becomes an ancestral deity (a perfect example of Buddhism dovetailing with Shinto). I am not speaking from a position of expertise, however. I am just as lost here as poor Hirata was in Iceland.

Lies!

I first heard of Cold Fever while living with an Icelandic fellow in a West Asian city that shall remain nameless. His brother was visiting him, and they talked about this movie as if it were a rite of passage for all Icelanders. I have no idea if that is even a little bit true, but what piqued my interest was their discussion of their favorite part of the movie. And what was that favorite part?

Elves.

Despite the credits, I can only recall one elf in the film—“Screaming Girl” (Álfrún Örnólfsdóttir)—who helps out Hirata when he is stuck overnight in the middle of nowhere. She destroys blocks of ice with her cosmic shrieking. This shrieking also inadvertently (and inexplicably) restarts the stalled Citroën, and Hirata continues on his way after she plunges back into the water.

This is not remotely the strangest thing that happens in his travels. The movie constantly hints at the presence of a spectral, invisible world, and most of Hirata’s misadventures involve him colliding with some form of religious belief.

The elf, for example, is anticipated at the beginning of Hirata’s misfortunes when he accidentally boards a German tour bus that takes him far away from Reykjavík. The guide provides some basic facts about Iceland, including an offhand remark about the country being “famous for its ghosts.”

Hirata makes his way back to the capital via taxi, except the driver stops for some unspecified errand. After patiently waiting, Hirata finally storms out of the car and finds the driver in a compromising position. Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, commented on this scene:

Early in the film, Atsushi (Masatoshi Nagase) is in an airport cab that stops so the driver can visit an isolated farmhouse. The visitor waits in the cab as long as he can bear it, and then peeks inside, where a roomful of Icelanders are performing a ritual with sheep and weird musical instruments. What are they doing? We do not have the slightest idea.

Here is a still image of the scene Ebert is referring to.

Aha! We are back in my comfort zone now. This is a living Nativity, a custom associated with the Christian festival of Christmas, still practiced today in some parts of Europe and the Americas. I even wrote about it in the last column. You’re welcome!

Then, in Reykjavík, a woman is drawn to Hirata by their “psychic connection” and offers to sell him her car—the run-down, red Citroën DS. By sheer coincidence, the very night I watched this movie, the Alternate Ending Discord server was abuzz about common words perceived as exotic by foreigners, with one person offering the example of Japanese tourists wearing T-shirts that read “Pizza.” Well, sometimes the shirt is on the other chest.

Eventually, Hirata runs into the movie’s Hollywood stars, Stevens and Taylor, playing the quarreling couple Jack and Jill. They are, by the way, the strangest thing in the film, not merely because they are louder and crasser than all of Hirata’s other encounters but because they communicate with each other via sock puppet: