Set just before the financial crisis of 2008, LIFE IN A FISHBOWL makes clear from the outset that its characters are as dysfunctional as Iceland’s banking system would turn out to be. Young mother Eik (Hera Hilmar) is struggling to cope with her mortgage, her debts and raising her diabetic daughter. To earn extra cash she turns to prostitution which brings her into contact with Reykjavik’s scuzzy and hedonistic club scene. Also plunged into this world is the former star footballer Solvi (Thor Kristjansson), forced by injury to take up banking instead. Meanwhile outside, roaming the cold streets and bars is the poet and novelist Mori (Thorstein Bachmann), perpetually drunk and prone to be beaten up by his friends, a wild-haired throwback to Iceland’s saga-encrusted history.
Mori is however successful enough in his career to own a property, coveted by Solvi’s bank in their quest to demolish that part of town and develop a hotel complex. As Solvi is dragged deeper into the sleazier side of business, to the dismay of his increasingly-abandoned wife and young daughter, Eik’s own daughter and Eik herself are befriended by Mori, seeing in them some salvation from his boozing and a terrible dark secret. Eik responds, having plenty of family issues herself, particularly with her ailing grandfather, to whom she won’t speak or let her daughter near.
‘Welcome to the Vikings!’
LIFE IN A FISHBOWL (and the water in it is significant) seems initially to be a multi-stranded story with linked characters along the lines of CRASH or MAGNOLIA, but it settles down instead to focus on the three principals, and the fallout from the ‘business trip’ to a boat in Florida that Solvi and Eik are obliged to attend in the interests of their day job and night job respectively. Mori is left to babysit, with consequences that both unlock his secret and trigger Eik’s grisly family revelations. Solvi meanwhile is left to deal with the aftermath of his banking colleagues’ leering advice that ‘out of town doesn’t count’ as they arrive on the boat for a hooker- and cocaine-heavy weekend, to be greeted with cries of ‘Welcome to the Vikings!’
In terms of plotting, the various outcomes to the stories are highly satisfactory (though not so much for the English and Dutch economies, it’s suggested). For example, the dread accompanying the truth about Mori’s past is neatly turned into a redemptive, if predictable, solution tying up several loose ends; and this is in a way the film’s problem. Going down so many dark routes at once to emerge with two out of three happy endings seems as arbitrary as the revelations about Eik’s grandfather (something similar had apparently happened to the director Baldvin Zophoníasson, presumably justifying the ‘Based on True Events’ caption used in the trailer).
That said, LIFE IN A FISHBOWL is beautifully and believably acted throughout, and Zophoniasson is confident enough to pause the melodrama in favour of quiet and telling moments, as when Mori and Eik’s daughter laugh together at cartoons on TV. There’s also repeated use of Italy’s 1964 Eurovision Song Contest winner, ‘Non ho l’età’ (‘I’m not old enough’ – another clue.)
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