Given that Icelandic writer-director Asa Hjorleifsdottir’s A Letter from Helga is based on a sprawling novel (by Bergsveinn Birgisson), it’s fitting that the lyrical love story it tells is between two tragically different readers. Helga, a young mother and sheep farmer, is the sort of reader with such an idealistic passion for literature that she speaks and feels in verse. Her emotions are book-sized. She lives in chapters. She looks and behaves – those shy glances, the hopeful eyes, the leaps of faith – like a character in a story. She once married her husband – a man with no time for the written word – in pursuit of a life-long adventure. But that never happened, and now her reality has been hijacked by the language of fiction. She reads so that she can dream beyond their remote fjord in 1940s’ Iceland. And there’s Bjarni, her rugged neighbour and popular farmhand, and one of the dozen members of their little book club. Bjarni reads to find newer purposes and ways of living. He reads to compose his loyalty to his homeland, and to live different dreams within his reality on the fjord. His wife is grieving a miscarriage, and Bjarni loses himself in words to seek the engagement he deserves.
A Letter from Helga is perceptive in its reading of their romance. The two don’t gravitate towards one another like most like-minded characters tend to. Their coupling is, in fact, triggered by petty town gossip. Someone sees them having a harmless chat by the sea, and that’s that. The tension created by these empty rumours is, ironically, what unites them. Until then, Helga and Bjarni lived next to each other without quite noticing each other. So, in a way, they find one another because others in the community are bored and don’t read. It’s fiction that makes sparks fly. It’s friction that makes their fates collide. When Bjarni goes to help her with her sheep, she brings it up and they gently mock the townspeople. But not once do they scoff at the prospect of having an affair. It’s almost like they suddenly see what the rest do; they stay careful with their words. Even after their first roll in the hay (literally), Helga and Bjarni communicate in subtext – explicitly asking each other what they lack in their respective marriages – because they are so conditioned to the emotional fullness of literature. They aren’t just exchanging dialogue but also the author’s thoughts and descriptions between the dialogue.
You’d think a shared affection for books – especially in a land of farming and rural minds – is a recipe for readymade soulmates. But there’s a lovely moment midway through the film that doesn’t shatter this illusion so much as poetically dismantle it. In a book-reading session, Helga expects Bjarni to offer the most romantic interpretation of a passage she chooses. But to her surprise, and eventual heartbreak, another unassuming man in the group offers that poignant answer she hoped to hear. Bjarni instead interprets it in a manner that reveals his own limitations, like a right-wing intellectual trapped by the smallness of (be)longing. Her face falls, and it’s at this moment that Helga understands that reading has created and ruined them at once. Her escape is different from his. He is not like her husband, but he is not like her either. She is willing to leave everything and move to Reykjavik with him, but Bjarni is not as lofty and free-spirited as she imagined. He doesn’t have the courage to walk the talk. He wants everything – a wife who doesn’t know but knows, a lover who makes him feel alive, a village who accepts their careless whispers, a half-future and illicit companionship, a sense of zest without the responsibility that comes with it.