Ulver — Svidd Neger — released 13/09/2003
Hello, my darlings. Today we have yet another double review, for we’re checking out the soundtrack to Svidd Neger (Burnt Negro), a movie by Erik Smith Meyer and Stein Elvestad, so we’re clearly also checking out the movie first.
Very well. Svidd Neger is definitely not your conventional movie for a variety of reasons. The plot, while straightforward and obvious on the surface, gets deeper than it looks as it goes. From IMDB:
Anna lives with her father Karl someplace in the outskirts of northern Norway. Karl killed his ex-wife and threw her newborn colored child into the sea when he discovered that she obviously had been unfaithful. Now Karl is being haunted by her ghost and is developing a serious drinking problem. Anna is looking for the love of her life, but there aren’t many bachelors around — until they discovers another small family on the other side of the mountain. They meet a semi-alcoholized widow on Karl’s age, her son Peder, and her black adopted son, Ante, that arrived from the sea on a piece of wood.
Ante is obviously Karl’s ex-wife’s illegitimate son, they all move together and become sort of half adopted family, half indentured workers to Karl. Ante’s family, Peder and Ellen, are acculturated Sámi who only speak norwegian in their day-to-day life. Ante, however, wants to go back to his family’s supposed roots, and only talks in pidgin Sámi. Ironically, an allegedly “true” Sámi called Normann Haetta Bongo Utsi Saus appears at a later point in the movie, and seems to be on the wall, to say the least, about his own identity.
I won’t go deep into detail, but Svidd Neger’s main thing, in my opinion, is about identity and desire: Karl wants a male heir, Ante wants to be Sámi and to have a father, Normann wants to be norwegian, Peder wants to be a macho stud and everyone wants Anna, who just wants to be free to want whoever she wants, et coetera. Stylistically, it’s a peculiar movie to say the least. It doesn’t really settle in a genre at all, going from coming-of-age drama to absurd slapstick comedy to dirty pornocomedy to almost slasher-adjacent heights of action and back again like it was nothing.
It’s painfully obvious that no one involved in this had even the slightest inkling of a clue of what “political correctness” means — the sex, violence and distribution of racial and sexual epithets are as gratuitous and absurd as they are frequent, which, while a little jarring sometimes even to seasoned, unsqueamish movie watcher such as me, go hand in hand with the ever-shifting, slightly nonsensical, very turn-of-the-century-european direction style, which strongly reminded me of all-timers such as Emir Kusturica’s Underground, Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen, Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Mitrevski and Popovski’s Goodbye, 20th Century, among others. The bad taste of more than a few passages is undeniable, and some of it hasn’t aged particularly well, at least according to contemporary standards, but, in my opinion, it’s not gratuitous or born from the author’s crassness: it’s a way to exacerbate just how hypocritical and shitty people can be, while also being so ridiculous that, to earnestly take away a legitimately racist or prejudiced message from Svidd Neger, one would have to be particularly gullible and incapable of critical thought.
Is it an edgy movie? Most definitely, but with good justification for the most part. Is it an amazing, mindblowing movie? No, I don’t think many people would say it is, but I think it’s pretty good nevertheless. Finally, DOES IT PULVERIZE? Much like Karl does to Ante’s adoptive family’s house, it mostly does.
“Dio, but what about the music?”, I hear you ask. Fear not, my loyle disciples, for I have exhaustively jammed the Svidd Neger soundtrack over these last few days. Coming in at just a little over half an hour, it’s remarkably diverse, far more than I usually expect movie soundtracks to be.
I feel like there are few sounds or timbres in each song, meaning there’s usually one “main” instrument who does most of the work and but a few secondary ones that do the accompaniment. That sounded way better in my head and I now realize that I just described most music in the most vague way possible, but what matters is how well the tracks are put together from a simple motif and but a handful of well-curated sounds. Of course, there are your run-of-the-mill orchestral pieces, but even those have this distinct flavoring to them that makes them special enough, such as Wild Cat; which, by the way, comes just before what might be my favorite moment on this album: the Rock Massif Pt. I and II segue, the undeniable climax, with a triumphant, menacing feel to them.
Much like the movie it was crafted for, this album has zero problem with swerving in and out of different moods, aesthetics and genre conventions. It really is more than just an accompanying piece, but a bona fide sonic illustration of Svidd Neger’s plot, in my opinion. That does not mean, however, that it depends on the movie to stand up on its own. I said the same about Lyckantropen Themes alright, but I do think Svidd takes it to the next level: not counting the occasional 20-second interludes that kind of give it away, I don’t think I would necessarily assume this to be a ST at first glance. Some songs are more basic, yes, but even those are fairly interesting on their own
Svidd Neger lacks Perdition City’s deambulating experimentalism and Lyckantropen Themes’ stony consistency, but more than makes up for it by showcasing just how creative they can be, not just despite but also due to the source material’s more constricted conditions. It’s definitely a more specific kind of Ulver album, somewhat out of the curve in a way, but still a very good one at that. Between melancholic ambient pieces, twitchy electronic interludes and epic guitar riff songs, the boys really did it again.
DOES IT PULVERIZE? Four-letter word for “intercourse” yeah.
