VENICE - Many pleasures can be had at the Venice Film Festival. It is, after all, in Venice. One of the perennial treats is walking into a screening of a film you've never heard of - even the most carefully built personal schedules have happy holes in them - and finding a bit of unplanned serendipity.
Enter Under the Tree, a dry Icelandic satire of social mores in the twenty-first century. Not that I know a lot about Icelandic social mores. I do know, from hearing director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson's post-screening Q&A, that trees are pretty rare there, and they cause a fair number of neighborly disputes. In the film, one couple is upset about their neighbors' tree, which throws shade over an otherwise sunny yard. The tree-keeping couple refuses to trim the offending branches. Things escalate. Garden gnomes are found in obscene configurations. Family pets are put in peril. There's a sex tape, and there's a chainsaw. And then things get serious.
Under the Tree is like a Michael Haneke film on laughing gas. It's a blast of sympathetic nihilism. Here's hoping it finds an audience with a slightly bent sense of humor.
