Road movies have been around for years. It is just that we did not call them that in those days. "The Grapes of Wrath", for instance, was a "literary adaptation", "Saboteur" a "suspense thriller" and "Wild Strawberries" "Scandinavian art-house drama". I am not quite sure when the term "road movie" was first used but as jargon to define a genre it is now as much in common parlance as "Western", "Musical" and "Film noir". In the right hands a film depicting an odyssey can be one of cinema's most satisfying formats from the point of view of narrative architecture. There is the setting out, the journey itself and, hopefully, an arrival. As the protagonist(s) move away from the familiar to the unknown there is that heightened sense of awareness of strange landscapes and often stranger people. Encounters can be friendly, eccentric or threatening. The arrival, if it is reached can either bring about fulfillment or disillusion. "Cold Fever" has these very ingredients, beautifully balanced to make it one of the best road movies outside the Angelopoulos canon. It starts in Tokyo where a young Japanese is pondering whether to take a golf holiday in Hawaii or visit Iceland to locate the place where his parents died in an accident, in order to perform a simple religious ritual that will enable their souls to rest in peace. Conscience dictates the latter, resulting in a journey through a frozen alien landscape in bleak midwinter. On the way he encounters eccentrics - a taxi driver who abandons him to take part in a nativity enactment in a snowbound shed and a girl whose hobby is recording funerals, a baddie - a foul-mouthed American who steals his car and a goodie - an elderly Samaritan-type who helps him find the remote place where his parents died. The journey brings fulfilment, but not before the the young man has spent much of his time battling against the discomfiture of the elements. We empathize completely with his struggle, so much so that the simple ritual he enacts at the end by the wintry river is both poignant and joyful. "Cold Fever" is everything one means when using the term "a little gem".
Review of Cold Fever
