Mending Fences ANIMOSITY AND ADAPTATION IN JEREMY SIMS’ RAMS
Back in 2015, the new film from Australian director Jeremy Sims, Last Cab to Darwin, did the rounds of the international festival circuit alongside an Icelandic film called Rams, directed by Grímur Hákonarson.1 The latter is an understated triumph of cinema, which, through the tale of two feuding brothers, meditates on the cycles of life and death; humankind’s relationship with animals, landscape and climate; and the emotional intricacies of family. The film would have sat at the back of Sims’ mind for a couple of years until producers Janelle Landers and Aidan O’Bryan approached him to direct an Australian remake based on an adapted script by screenwriter Jules Duncan.2 The result is Rams (Sims, 2020).
Its predecessor is a beautiful film, touched by a sense of quiet, of repose, of world-weary bleakness; it also has an immensely affecting soundtrack defined by the minimalist organ works of Atli Örvarsson. And it contains (I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say) one of the most heartbreakingly moving, vivid and sad final scenes in recent cinema. Such is the poetry of Hákonarson’s film, it warrants comparison with another masterpiece that deals with the dignity and spirituality of traditional rural farming, the 2010 Italian film Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino).
In Sims’ Rams, the rolling hills of south-west Western Australia replace the sweeping plains of Iceland. The two Grimurson brothers (the name
