When Smilla met the Orca.

About a year ago – well, maybe it was more than a year… – I was zapping through TV channels when suddenly I came across a movie where a a beautiful woman with that typical 70′s look was surrounded by icebergs and water. I’ve had not seen it at that time, however in a matter of seconds I’d came to realize it was the ending of the movie “Orca, The Killer Whale”, directed by Michael Anderson.

What had got my attention on that scene was not only the classical beauty of Charlotte Rampling but the way this final sequence was resembling another ending scene of a film I’d watched on theater when it was released in 1997: Bille August‘s “Smilla’s Sense of Snow”.

Both movies deal with revenge and the seek of justice and have a promising start but as things go on the stories dive deeper on ridiculous ideas and solutions – an avenger whale, able to plan and implement the assassination of the ones who destroyed its “family” and the a woman trying to find the responsible for killing a boy for the sake of protecting information about a…well, I won’t reveal too much since you people may wish to watch the movies – I will only say that the it does not fit on what you’ve spent more than an hour watching.
Though the movies are not good their endings, as I said, are strangely beautiful: both of them have an idyllic feature, trully poetic and contemplative. Yes, the ends are not the same, they are considerably different but there is a similarity in its style – even the inverse panoramic shooting (“Orca’s” shooting underneath water and ice and “Smilla’s” above it) intensifies this feeling. Probably it is just a coincidence but I would not be surprised if one day Bille August tell us that he was inspired by the other movie’s end and decided to pay some kind of homage to it – the only good idea on the whole movie.