Last night on German TV I chanced upon a wonderful, subtly erotic movie from 2001 based on an Icelandic novel, "The Seagull´s Laughter", set in rural, small-town Iceland in the early 50s. The heroine Freya is a widow in her late 20s, who has come back to Iceland from America after her husband´s death to live with her family again.

Now, all through the movie Freya wears her thigh-length auburn hair in several updos, braided hairstyles, and down, and her hair is one of the distinguishing features that contribute to her alluring and mysterious presence, setting her apart from the plain-looking simple townfolk. Her hair remains one of the objects of desire on the part of several men who are attracted to her - at one point the pharmacist asks permission to brush out her hair one day, in another scene he discusses her acting as an elf in a play the villagers are staging, and what hairstyles would be suitable for her to wear on stage.

Freya is played by Icelandic actress Margret Vilhjamsdottir, a woman of a rare mystical natural beauty that is not delicate, but somehow strong and down-to-earth. I don´t know if the hair in the movie is her real hair, and I haven´t been able to find out anything more about her on the web, except that she starred in another Icelandic movie in 2003. There does not seem to be a DVD of the movie available (yet), but I might write to the public German TV channel to make me a copy. Long live public TV that can still show such out-of-the way movies!

But, my, what a marvellous woman, what glorious hair! And a good movie otherwise, too - a tragic comedy to capture the atmosphere of the far north in the beginning Cold War. I´m in a trance.