The crowded fast-food place doesn't have cappuccino, and over a fast-cooling paper cup of coffee with milk, Ágúst Gudmundsson's boyish bearded face is bemused. Elfish blue eyes add to the picture of mischievous Northland humor, in keeping with his enthusiastically received The Seagull's Laughter, opening here in New York City tonight (February 13) at seven.

Don't make the mistake, however, of imagining a rustic from Iceland. Casually but smartly dressed, he knows his literature, sports and films and is widely traveled, a near flawless British accent tinged with Scots reflecting long stays in the U.K., often with producer wife Kristín Atladóttir, whose theater degree is from Glasgow, and their two sons.

Gudmundsson's script derives from a first novel by a former journalist which is doing quite well in Danish and German translations but so far unavailable in English. An ex-actor who started out on TV and then studied at England's National Film School, he was attracted by the dry cold humor and beautifully rounded and diversely real characters of Kristín Marja Baldursdóttir's more broadly epic book. For the screen, much local period background was trimmed, e.g., labor problems and Grandpa's (Eyvindur Erlendsson) trade union politics, because "we had the visuals to do that." The fishing village locale really has those old houses and cars, needing only concealment of road tarmac and bunches of TV antennas and satellite dishes. "We had to pay for a lot of it," although the Country Council was very helpful and "we did get away with a lot, too."

Financing and distribution from Iceland are, in fact, usually problematic. Though The Dance won him the 1999 Best Director Award at the Moscow Film Festival, that film never found U.S. distribution, so "I consider myself lucky to have release here, in this difficult market, for this one." He is a little amused that The Seagull's Laughter won a church jury best-film accolade at Lübeck, maybe because Freya uses three drunks to sting her mother-in-law but in the process scolds the town's social inequalities. Shown at the Czech Republic Karlovy Vary Festival (which in pre-independence days alternated with Moscow), where Roger Ebert was on the jury, it got glowing reviews from Variety and others, people asked for tapes, and four distributors came up with offers.

Gudmundsson is very pleased with Cinema Guild's handling of the film, though homegrown funding for any project still remains precarious. Iceland has a population of only 300,000, so more than half of the two-million-dollar budget was raised abroad, from Eurimages and the Council of Europe (France), Nordic Film and TV (Norway), Denmark's Film Institute and the Berlin-Brandenburg Filmboard.

Unsurprisingly, weather can also be a handicap in the thermically active island republic that skirts the Arctic Circle and Ocean. "Something you have to learn to use to your advantage. Hope for certain weather, but be prepared to make changes in shooting schedule." I mention the weather and landscape in young Dagur Kári's recent Nói the Albino, another black-humor Icelandic film, and he notes that, perversely, they couldn't get enough snow for that one [filmed in a West Fjord hamlet where the thermometer has gone as high as 68°F only half-a-dozen times in the last century], even though snow avalanches are common, one having killed a northern farmer just last month.

Comedies in general travel badly, he muses, local humor often not translating well. Perhaps the Icelandic variety will fare better, with its typical mix of the outrageously comic and unthinkably tragic, such as the ironically purposeful avalanche in Nói. Then, too, there is the twinkle-in-the-eye ambiguity in so-called moral concerns. Freya (Margrét Vilhjálmsdóttir) in The Seagull's Laughter is closely related to the outsize heroines of thirteenth-century saga of the early settlers, Lady Macbeths urging their less shrewd, weaker willed menfolk on to revenge. For this spicily mysterious woman's physical bearings, he turned to the classic noirs and their femmes fatales, mentioning in particular Gilda, of which he has a well-used tape. Suspiciously widowed and returned from the U.S., Freya is more active than the other women, more openly sensual, but at the same time "too morally ambiguous to be close to the [viewer's] heart."

I offer a possible black-widow parallel to Jeanne Moreau as Widow Kohler in The Bride Wore Black. He nods but notes that that Renoir-Hitchcock-Marnie homage is also the only film Truffaut claimed he wished he hadn't made.

Hence, it is Agga (Ulga Egilsdóttir) who serves as our eyes, for the eleven-year-old is the only one in the village "not taken in . . .[and] detecting that this woman cannot be taken at face value." Still, the two cousins understand one another, and Vilhjálmsdóttir's buttocks-length hair was dyed to match the younger actress', "though actually they're pretty similar." Even then, he admits to contrivances, if one thinks about it, as for instance when the girl is crouched behind the "cash machine" in Freya's new shop as policeman Magnus (Hilmir Snær Gudnason) enters for a zipper replacement and needs crotch-measuring.

Egilsdóttir never quite looks her film age and at the end, with her hair free, is suddenly a young woman. Actually celebrating her fourteenth birthday during shooting, she had never before been given a part, though Gudmundsson first saw her headshot at a casting agency only after combing through schools in Reykjavík. She was abroad on holidays with her mother, but on her return "there was no question about it." In a simple reading audition where the director acted opposite her -- "I was the cop, I was the Granny" -- the girl's way of speaking showed great maturity with words, perhaps the influence of her mother, a university teacher of Icelandic to foreign students.

For obvious reasons, the language itself does not travel at all. More direct, less subtle than English, it must survive in subtitles, where "you are keenly aware of deficiencies." The film's translator, for example, has a fine command of Icelandic but, a "nice middle-class Brit," just couldn't bring himself to a literal rendering of Dodo's (Edda Björg Eyjólfsdóttir) unusual and not all that profane physical metaphor for disregarding upper-class capitalist opinion. The Evangelical Lutheran country's swear words overwhelmingly being churchly, i.e., the devil and hell, the woman's unusual excretory-system phrase is all that more effective but lost in a lame subtitle rendering.

But that is a mere quibble, brought up only at my prompting. Modest, and grateful for how far The Seagull's Laughter has taken the company formed with his wife, he is happy and is currently working on another project with producer Andy Paterson. With any luck at all, tonight's New York theatrical release should deservedly open doors to a successful future.