In praise of The Juniper Tree – The cult classic… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

In praise of The Juniper Tree – The cult clas­sic that gave Björk her first film role

15 Apr 2022

Words by Rachel Pronger

Young woman sat on a grassy field, looking upwards with a serious expression, black and white image.
Young woman sat on a grassy field, looking upwards with a serious expression, black and white image.
Before she was a glob­al super­star, the Ice­landic singer was a bewitch­ing sup­port­ing play­er in Niet­zch­ka Keene’s folk­lore drama.

When the trail­er for The North­man first dropped last year, one of its many tan­ta­lis­ing delights was a brief glimpse of Björk, loom­ing out from the mud, blood, and gloom in a resplen­dent head­dress, whis­per­ing some­thing pleas­ing­ly omi­nous. Björk’s per­for­mance as The Seer­ess in Robert Eggers’ Viking epic is some­thing of a coup – it marks the Ice­landic icon’s return to the big screen after a sev­en­teen-year absence.

Björk has always been a cin­e­mat­ic pop star, famous for her cap­ti­vat­ing music videos and bonkers out­fits, but her rela­tion­ship with actu­al cin­e­ma has been lim­it­ed. In 2000 she was acclaimed for her per­for­mance in Lars von Tri­ers Dancer in the Dark, but the expe­ri­ence of mak­ing the film was famous­ly fraught (von Tri­er described work­ing with his star as like deal­ing with ter­ror­ists”; Björk lat­er alleged on-set bul­ly­ing and sex­u­al harass­ment).

In the years since, aside from col­lab­o­rat­ing with ex-hus­band Matthew Bar­ney on the art film Draw­ing Restraint Nine, Björk has steered clear of act­ing. That was until Eggers came call­ing with a big book of Ice­landic sagas, a script co-writ­ten with long-time Björk col­lab­o­ra­tor Sjón, and a very on-brand costume.

Long before she was an inter­na­tion­al icon, anoth­er film­mak­er spot­ted Björk’s on-screen poten­tial. Niet­zch­ka Keene was still a film stu­dent at UCLA when she began devel­op­ing a fea­ture inspired by her love of Euro­pean folk­lore and a year spent in Ice­land. The result was The Juniper Tree, a revi­sion­ist take on a Broth­ers Grimm sto­ry set against an eerie vol­canic landscape.

Björk Guð­munds­dót­tir stars as Mar­git, a teenag­er adrift in the Ice­landic coun­try­side with her old­er sis­ter Kat­la (Bryn­dis Petra Bra­gadót­tir) after their moth­er is killed for being a witch. In order to sur­vive, Kat­la casts a spell to attract a hus­band, reel­ing in tac­i­turn wid­ow­er Johan (Valdimar Örn Fly­gen­ring). She and Mar­git move into the iso­lat­ed cot­tage Johan shares with his young son; although Mar­git forms a bond with the child, he rejects his new step­moth­er, threat­en­ing the sta­bil­i­ty of this ten­u­ous family.

It’s dif­fi­cult to watch The Juniper Tree now with­out see­ing it through the lens of its star. When pro­duc­tion took place in 1986, Björk was a freck­ly 21-year-old, pre-inter­na­tion­al fame, pre-swan dress, pre-The Sug­ar­cubes. By 1990, when the film pre­miered at Sun­dance, she was still years away from the release of her break­through album Debut. Dressed in burlap with a pix­ie fringe, Mar­git is miles away from the avant-garde diva Björk would lat­er become, but even at this ear­ly stage, she proves her­self a cap­ti­vat­ing screen presence.

Young woman seated in long grass, wearing dark clothing and scarf, against a backdrop of foliage.

Most of the per­for­mances in The Juniper Tree are mut­ed, even a lit­tle stilt­ed – Keene cap­tures a still solem­ni­ty in her actors which is very Bergman – so it falls to Björk to give the film its heart. In her hands Mar­git is del­i­cate and sen­si­tive, crack­ling with volatile mag­ic. Like her sis­ter, Mar­git has spe­cial pow­ers, and Keene draws out Björk’s oth­er­world­li­ness in eerie sequences in which she is vis­it­ed by visions of her dead moth­er, who hov­ers silent­ly out­side her win­dow or opens her shawl to reveal a gap­ing black hole in her chest.

That lat­ter image wouldn’t be out of place on a Björk album cov­er, and The Juniper Tree fits per­fect­ly with the cul­tur­al myth-mak­ing of an artist who has always drawn on Iceland’s land­scapes and tra­di­tions. The film brims with visu­als that would slot seam­less­ly into one of the musician’s spec­tac­u­lar videos, while eerie lines (“Did you sew his foot­prints into his coat? Did you sprin­kle your blood into his tea?”) could eas­i­ly be Björk lyrics. Just as von Tri­er utilised Björk’s musi­cal­i­ty by cast­ing her in a musi­cal, so Keene makes the most of her voice by hav­ing Mar­git sing to her­self con­stant­ly, creepy lit­tle folk songs occa­sion­al­ly punc­tu­at­ed by bird-like squawks.

Aside from mutu­al admi­ra­tion for Björk, Keene and Robert Eggers share much com­mon ground. Both are nerdi­ly enthu­si­as­tic Amer­i­can out­siders drawn to Iceland’s land­scapes and folk­lore, mix­ing and match­ing fairy tales, myths, and leg­ends to cre­ate a dream­like stew. In Eggers’ work, humans share the screen with mon­sters, mer­maids, and suc­cubae; in Keene’s too, enchant­ment is as much a part of the scenery as fjords and volcanoes.

In The Witch, Eggers makes join­ing a child-eat­ing coven seem like the only sen­si­ble response to intractable Puri­tan misog­y­ny. The women in The Juniper Tree make sim­i­lar­ly prag­mat­ic choic­es, using their mag­ic in order to sur­vive. The stakes are high, as Keene estab­lish­es when the sis­ters encounter the body of a woman face down in a stream. They’ve stoned her and left for the ravens,” Kat­la tells Mar­git mat­ter-of-fact­ly. We haven’t gone far enough away from home.” In these fem­i­nist retellings, the witch­es are less scary than the thin-skinned men that sur­round them (unless you’re a small blonde child – in which case, beware).

The Juniper Tree is much sim­pler visu­al­ly than the id fan­tasias of The Witch and The Light­house, but Keene shares Egger’s flare for milk­ing max­i­mum atmos­phere out of every dol­lar. Crisp black and white 35mm gives The Juniper Tree a time­less feel, and Keene lets the mag­i­cal scenery shine, shoot­ing her actors through cas­cad­ing water­falls or plumes of steam. In long still wide shots Keene’s actors become tiny fig­ures in these vast vis­tas. The very first image of Björk’s Mar­git we see is of her lying against a boul­der, gaz­ing out­wards, blend­ing into the crags and clouds, dwarfed by her epic surroundings.

In the 35 years since the mak­ing of The Juniper Tree, its young star has become an icon and its promis­ing direc­tor has passed away. Keene died of can­cer in 2004 at the age of 54, leav­ing behind an unfin­ished third fea­ture and two unpro­duced screen­plays. Her won­der­ful­ly weird first film lives on, how­ev­er, as a cult curio wait­ing to be redis­cov­ered by new gen­er­a­tions of Björk fans and Ice­land enthu­si­asts. As Björk returns to the big screen in The North­man, now is the per­fect moment to go back to where it began and revis­it her first screen role. Björk before she was Björk, dressed in burlap, sur­round­ed by won­der, and always bril­liant­ly strange.

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