The North

NOW IN UK CINEMAS! Writer/director Bart Schrijver brings us The North, which follows two friends, Chris (Bart Harder), and Lluis (Carles Pulido),  as they reunite for the first time in years to take on The West Highland Way and The Cape Wrath Trail, an epic hike of some 450 km through the wilds of Scotland.

At the outset, Chris is deep into a draining career but tied down in numerous, seemingly rewarding ways, whereas Lluis has recently, quietly given up his work as a wedding photographer and seems badly withdrawn. Here, the film manages the neat trick of being as beautiful up close as its landscapes, with the tiny wrinkles and stressed friendship between Chris and Lluis waning and waxing and becoming more monumental than the wilds filmed around them. 

And filmed they are; Schrijver and his cinematographer, Twan Peeters, traveled the route in order, somehow staging the drama as they moved the production through hundreds of miles of remote landscape. It’s hardy and impressive filmmaking, and it informs us about our two leads – a bit. 

But if I’m honest here, the up close drama and the galactic beauty orbiting it sometimes felt like difficult bedfellows. The tightly wrapped performances of Harder and Pulido, under Schrijver’s direction are so terrific that I soon felt the film could have succeeded in a car park. The silent traffic thrumming between our two leads is so gripping throughout that it pushes the insanely gorgeous environments out of band, if you will. It should be noted I didn’t see this in a cinema, where the impact would be entirely different from a screener.

“…an epic hike of some 450 km through the wilds of Scotland…”

Anyway, in much the same way that On the Buses isn’t exactly Taxi Driver, this film about two men sharing a tiny tent, with lengthy games of Uno and one playful spank, is not quite Brokeback Mountain. Unless we’d like that, perhaps? Throughout, I was pretty convinced that there was something deeper between Chris and Lluis, whether in the past or not, and this hung over the film without ever clarifying. I wondered if any of the public sector bodies in the credits might have been stirred up by the promise of marginalized voices and all that. It was a confusing thread throughout. The film also made use of some crowdfunding. 

Anyway, who cares? It’s fun to watch a nice Nederlander let loose on the Scottish Highlands. The Dutch come from a two-dimensional country and seem to share Maria from The Sound of Music’s need to seek any incline. As such, their play here is rewarding, and there is something precious and holy about the hike. 

“Even a good day in nature is better than a bad day in the office, you know it’s true,” says Lluis to Chris of the wilderness they spend the film in. But couldn’t Schrijver have dug into the culture of these paths also? Feet have cut them since Europe and Britain were joined at the hip. The very interesting human pasts that clung to them weren’t much considered. Coffin roads, wolf shelters, the real cost of interaction between man and his world? All fun things that are replaced by the picturesque wilds and the modern hiking industry around it. In that sense, the magical scenery captured so brilliantly provides little to the narrative besides as a quest in itself. So at its worst, the film resembles a long tour through the inside of a rather beautiful Maguffin? But it is very seldom at its worst.

Anyway, it’s beautiful, and it’s brilliant, and much like a walk, it’s good for you.