In an era where face value is justice, obesity and ugliness have become almost the harshest verdict on a person. As humans, we can’t really ignore the physical body and reach the soul directly. Sometimes, the beautiful soul is trapped in an unbearable flesh, which gives rise to a tragedy that cannot be named.This quiet “The Mountain of Virgins” describes this kind of deep-rooted sadness and loneliness. Foss is a fat, ugly man who works as a baggage handler in the airport ground handling department. He has almost no friends, and the one or two people he does keep socializing with are connected by these eccentric hobbies. He was too kind and timid to meet people’s eyes and always kept his head down when talking to them. So he was teased, taunted and questioned by his workmates whether he was a virgin or not. And in the midst of his depressed life, he encountered a sudden love, a woman suffering from depression and he came together, he thought he and the other can save each other, but in the end, it turns out that things did not work out as expected.
As an Icelandic film, all the details of “The Mountain of Virgins” naturally permeate with the chill and detachment characteristic of Northern Europe, and the cold mood and the lonely story add to each other. The opening shot beautifully sets the director’s ambition. In the overhead shot, the empty airport runway is slowly circled by the luggage car, silent, and the light is crisp and cold on the ground. Distilling emotion from the mundane scenes of everyday life is a unique feat, and one that is very well honed in many Nordic films. For this film, all the shaped scenes are reflections of the characters’ mental maps.
Fosse bought himself a remote control car, downstairs in the open space against the wind, lonely control, for him, real life is he can not shake and control, he can grasp, as well as what he likes, are childlike or adolescent childish things. For example, the World War II sandbox, such as the toy car, such as the tacit agreement between him and the midnight radio DJ to order a song, he manipulated the little soldiers, remote control of the car, he heard a song he liked from the radio, can vent his emotions, this is all the fun of his life, everything is related to the “things”, things It’s all about “things”, things that don’t hurt him, but people are perhaps even more frightening. He was rehearsing the battle for World War II, but he had no idea what he was doing with his real life.
Fuchs himself is a symbol of isolation, and everyone sees him as a monster. His kindness can only be understood by the neighborhood children, he accompanies the lonely little girl but is suspected of being a pedophile by her father, and the love he encounters, initially bewildered, is later seen by him as a lifesaver. This flip is interesting, initially, the woman led him, a little to let him understand, love is a kind of relationship, and how to get along, and soon, he found each other’s problems, when the woman into depression can not help, Foss became a teacher, he cooked breakfast for her, go to work for her, to help her out of the gloom. The two “patients” accidentally became each other’s doctors.
The relationship had its ups and downs, they were close and distant, then the woman found the obese man trustworthy and asked him to move in with her, but in the end, she changed her mind. However, even so, she still saved the man, so that he finally took the first step to live independently, so that he understood that the real world of human affairs in the end how much warmth and change, as an adult must face it all. The emotional ups and downs between them are actually the changing emotional cues of a normal man and woman, only, placed in the bodies of two deviants, making everything seem to have a diffuse sadness. But this sadness eventually dissipates, allowing Fosse to gain insight into the real world.
The second half of the movie shows a subtle change. After Fosse has a girlfriend, everything changes. He goes to work for the woman at the dump, where his colleagues are far kinder than the ones who caught him at the airport, and they invite him to drink and watch football together at the bar, treating him like a normal buddy. His girlfriend was like a fulcrum that pried him out of the cramped life he was otherwise trapped in, showing him that the world, though full of holes, was worth diving into and experiencing for once.
Eventually, he blossomed into laughter alone on a plane to a foreign country. It was a smile that was hard to see in the movie, Fosse, a change from his previous dullness. He came out of his family of origin, out of his closed heart, and that smile was almost one of the most healing expressions.
