Denmark Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: Sick of Myself

March 25, 20232022, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Norway, Sweden

Syk pike
***½/****
starring Kristine Kujath Thorp, Eirik Sæther, Fanny Vaager
written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw Effectively the Ruben Östlund film that got away, Kristoffer Borgli’s acerbic Sick of Myself (and I can’t say the title without singing it to the tune of the Matthew Sweet anthem of self-loathing) skewers the cult of victimhood that runs parallel to any progressive social awakening, muddying the waters to such an extent that the language of tolerance becomes weaponized, and true gains come clouded with apologies and equivocations. One step forward, 80 years’ worth of steps back. A scene late in Sick of Myself between a poisonous narcissist and the friend and journalist trying to make sense of it all has the malignant party saying they’re the real victim of their own absurd machinations, because, given a choice, no one would ask to be a psychopath. It’s funny because it’s familiar: how self-pity is the easier sensation to bear over shame. And it’s familiar because there isn’t even anything like the illusion of accountability left in this world. The worst of us, given an unprecedented platform to do harm, will never admit to anything like fault or suffer anything like consequences.

The Worst Person in the World (2021)

February 2, 20222021, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, France, Norway, Romance, Sweden, Theatrical

Verdens verste menneske
***½/****
starring starring Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum
written by Eskil Vogt, Joachim Trier
directed by Joachim Trier

by Walter Chaw Joachim Trier has had his ear, unerring, pressed against the pulse of sweet melancholia and regret from the very beginning. He followed his first feature, Reprise, a downbeat essay of aspiring writers on the cusp of validation or immolation, with Oslo, August 31st, a jarring and indelible chronicle of one day in the life of a junkie trying for a second chance, maybe too late. Trier’s English-language debut, Louder than Bombs, was about how a father and son remember their dead wife/mother differently, while his Thelma was a supernaturally-tinged coming-of-age film and my favourite movie of that year. Now comes this intense character study of the anxious generation, The Worst Person in the World. These films share an interest in people at a crossroads and forced to evolve. If I have a beef with Trier, it’s that his endings of late have tended towards, if not tidiness exactly, at least a neatness not befitting his characters and their messy lives. It’s less a failing of his than a failing of mine. I think what they do, though, these endings that feel like endings, is push his films a little away from realism and a little towards fable. The Worst Person in the World, accordingly, is a film through which it appears that Trier–32 at the time of Reprise, 47 now–is wrestling with what it means to be 30 in 2021 after providing such immediate and raw social landscapes in his early work. I wonder if fable is the only way to properly contextualize the young as we push into and past middle age. Maybe it would feel unseemly to pretend otherwise.

TIFF ’21: Flee

September 18, 20212021, Animation, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Norway, Sweden, TIFF

**½/****
directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen

by Angelo Muredda The past is as fluid as the rotoscoped animation used to bring it to life in Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee, a high-concept work of creative nonfiction whose unconventional style promises an immersiveness it can’t really deliver. Rasmussen’s animated documentary profile of his childhood friend, pseudonymously named Amin Nawabi to protect his identity, is intermittently moving and insightful about the horrors, the exhausting subterfuge, and the briefest moments of levity that define his life as a queer Afghan refugee, first in Russia and then in Denmark. But the opacity of its subject–whose story of family suffering, persecution, hiding, and now something like domestic stability, has frequently shifted not just for state officials but also for his friend and biographer–leaves the film as vague as its buzzword title. Moreover, Rasmussen’s inability to do more with those discrepancies besides shrug at the ambiguities of first-person storytelling from far afield places plagued by civil war flattens the closing emotional pitch.

Riders of Justice (2020)

July 9, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, Theatrical

Retfærdighedens ryttere
***/****
starring Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Andrea Heick Gadeberg, Roland Møller
written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen

by Walter Chaw Dogma 95 vet Anders Thomas Jensen has a particular interest in oddness. Characters, especially, in Jensen’s films as writer and director are given to sometimes-extravagant eccentricity, fueled by traumas Jensen declines to sanitize that are often exacerbated by intelligence worn as an unwelcome birth defect. Consider the menagerie at the centre of Jensen’s Men & Chicken, an updating in a way of The Island of Dr. Moreau reconfigured as a “light” family drama in the Danish countryside. Mads Mikkelson stars in that one, too, playing a chronic masturbator who finds out that his father has been splicing his own sperm with animal sperm in an attempt to… Well, look, it’s an interesting piece about social norms and how an inability to assimilate culturally leads to these islands of misfit boys. Jensen is interested, specifically and obsessively, in what happens when physical and mental mutations stunt emotional and social development. Though no one would want the crown, he is the poet laureate of the incel state.

Into the Wildland: FFC Interviews Jeanette Nordahl

September 27, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Interviews

Jeanette Nordahl’s Wildland (a.k.a. Kød & blod) doesn’t feel like somebody’s directorial debut at all. Where so many first features are packed to the gills with every idea the director’s ever had for fear they’ll never get another opportunity to make a movie, this one is indicated by an extraordinary reserve, a sense that for as much as made it into the film, there was more left on the table. Its connective tissue is diaphanous and reliant on the experience the viewer brings to it. Some veteran filmmakers could stand to learn from this–that an active viewership is a state to which one should aspire in art, not actively avoid. Wildland is a mature piece done by a filmmaker with a gratifying faith in both herself and her audience.

TIFF ’20 ‘Quibi’: Another Round; Falling; Spring Blossom

September 22, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF, UK

by Bill Chambers To wrap up our TIFF coverage, some ‘quick bites’ in honour of the fallen streaming service, Quibi. Movies about alcoholism always make me want to drink, so maybe it’s true that there’s no such thing as an antiwar movie. Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round (***/****), to be fair, makes drinking inviting because it depicts it almost exclusively as a social activity, when few us have socialized in months. Mads Mikkelsen stars as Martin, a high-school teacher in the throes of a mid-life crisis that’s jeopardizing his career and putting a strain on his marriage. After confiding his gloomy outlook to three of his colleagues–Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), and Peter (Lars Ranthe)–while out celebrating Nikolaj’s 40^th birthday, they get to talking about Norwegian philosopher Finn Skårderud, who allegedly believes that human beings would function better with a Blood Alcohol Content of 0.05%. Thus begins an experiment among the foursome to secretly maintain a constant state of tipsiness, which, lo, does yield some positive results, including the adorable runt of Tommy’s soccer team, Specs, becoming champ for a day. The first half of Another Round (whose Danish title, Druk, means “binge-drinking”) is a bit like watching X-Men discover their superpowers–but, y’know, it’s booze, and the four men eventually can’t resist drinking past the point of “ignition,” leading to domestic strife and even tragedy. For all that, the film is more realistic than moralistic, a feature-length expansion of Reese Witherspoon’s credo from James L. Brooks’s How Do You Know: “Don’t drink to feel better. Drink to feel even better.” Mikkelsen is touchingly wistful in a role that’s 180° removed from Hannibal Lecter but still counts on his innate combustibility, and the film engages in some hilarious internal debate over whether drinking is good or bad for politics.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Wildland

August 30, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Thriller

Kød & blod
***½/****
starring Sidse Babett Knudsen, Sandra Guldberg Kampp, Elliott Crosset Hove, Besir Zeciri
written by Ingeborg Topsøe
directed by Jeanette Nordahl

by Walter Chaw Opening like a film from the New French Extremity, what with its phantom images of a deadly car accident set as a framing event for everything to follow, Danish director Jeanette Nordahl's Wildland (originally Kød & blod, or "flesh and blood") resolves as a domestic implosion in the vein of David Michôd's Animal Kingdom. The accident has claimed the mother of pretty, taciturn 17-year-old Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp), leaving her at the mercy of social services, who deem in their wisdom to place Ida with her Aunt Bodil (Sidse Babett Knudsen). Bodil has three grown sons who, at her direction, are involved in a criminal enterprise of sorts, and Wildland's MacGuffin is the collection of a debt from a recalcitrant client. What the game is is never terribly clear, but it's obvious that this is not an ideal environment for Ida following her recent trauma. Neither is it clear whether Ida was complicit in the fatal accident, though her dreams and fantasies–and the claustrophobic way Nordahl shoots her film in general (and Ida in particular) in long, unbroken closeups–certainly suggest Ida feels guilty about something. I don't mention these opacities as a detriment: far from it. Nordahl's picture isn't interested in the sundry details of its MacGuffins because they are MacGuffins.

Domino (2019)

June 1, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Belgium, Crime, Denmark, Directors: Brian De Palma, Espionage, France, Italy, Netherlands, Thriller

***/****
starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Carice Van Houten, Eriq Ebouaney, Guy Pearce
written by Petter Skavlan
directed by Brian De Palma

by Alice Stoehr When Brian De Palma was 17, relates Julie Salamon in her book The Devil’s Candy, he tried to prove his father was having an affair. “All summer long he recorded his father’s telephone calls,” she writes. “On more than one occasion he climbed up a tree outside his father’s office and snapped pictures of him and his nurse.” Though perhaps too pat as an origin story, this experience–oft-repeated by biographers, as well as the director himself–haunts his filmography. From Dressed to Kill to Blow Out to Snake Eyes, his characters and camera fixate on audiovisual evidence. They foreground how film itself can act as documentation, to either reveal or distort the truth. These same preoccupations shape Domino, his thirtieth feature and the first he’s directed since 2012’s Passion. The espionage thriller, penned by Norwegian screenwriter Petter Skavlan, intertwines three sets of characters as they bound across Western Europe. Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is a Copenhagen cop who sees his partner’s throat slit in a set-piece modelled after the opening of Vertigo. He seeks vengeance against the assailant, Ezra (Eriq Ebouaney), who’s blackmailed by a handler at the CIA (Guy Pearce) into tracking down the same ISIS cell that beheaded his father. It’s tawdry material, nesting two revenge narratives and plenty of terrorist intrigue inside a film that’s under 90 minutes long.

Hot Docs ’19: On the Inside of a Military Dictatorship

April 25, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019

***/****
directed by Karen Stokkendal Poulsen

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers It’s telling that the reality of Myanmar as a kind of Hell on Earth has subverted Hollywood’s couple attempts to set a white-saviour narrative there (John Boorman’s Beyond Rangoon and Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo), and Karen Stokkendal Poulsen’s illuminating On the Inside of a Military Dictatorship shows how hopeful roads out of that Hell have come to dead ends. On the surface a pro forma mix of talking heads, archival footage, and a little bit of scenic tourism, the piece distinguishes itself with its high-profile interview subjects and a structure that gives certain ironies their due for those only passingly familiar with the country’s history. (Like me.) From 1962 until 2011, the once and future Burma was under military rule, having violently resisted a brief democratic uprising in the late-’80s led by Aung San Suu Kyi, who was subsequently imprisoned in her home for close to two decades. But with strict sanctions placed on all its prominent generals in the U.S. and Europe, the military decided to rehabilitate their international reputation by rebranding the government a democracy.

TIFF ’18: Aniara

September 20, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, Sci-Fi, Sweden, TIFF

****/****
written by Pella Kågerman & Hugo Lilja, based on the poem by Harry Martinson
directed by Pella Kågerman & Hugo Lilja

by Bill Chambers The opening credits of Aniara, the debut feature from short-film hyphenates Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, scroll like closing credits over images of earthly disasters, because of course they do: this is the end. Mars is the new West, and what's left of humanity–many of those faces scarred or disfigured without comment–is packed aboard a new Noah's Ark bound for the red planet. It will take three weeks, but in the meantime enjoy all the amenities and luxuries of a high-end spa, and be sure to take advantage of the Mima lounge, where a digital godhead will tap into your memories and provide a soothing mental escape to Earth as you once knew it. Unfortunately for the colonists, a rogue screw strikes the ship's hull and Aniara is forced to empty its fuel tank. The captain, Chefone (Arvin Kananian), claims they just need to catch the orbit of a celestial body to get back on course, something that will take two years, max; the captain lies. MR (Isabelle Huppert-esque Emelie Jonsson) is a "mimarobe," sort of a combination tech support/apostle for Mima, which becomes a very popular attraction over time. So much so that it gets overwhelmed by all the despair it's having to tranquilize, and self-destructs. Although MR warned him of this outcome, Chefone disciplines her for it, because Mima was the opiate for Aniara's masses. Not their god, though–he, in his unchecked power, his command of his own "planet," is God, and he's decided to be the Old Testament kind.

Hot Docs ’18: We Could Be Heroes

May 4, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018, Morocco, Qatar, Sports, Tunisia

**½/****
directed by Hind Bensari

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Oy, that title. It thankfully proves somewhat ironic, although disability docs would be wise going forward to avoid sentimental trigger words like “heroes,” Bowie homage or not, if they don’t want to be stigmatized as inspiration porn. The problem with We Could Be Heroes is that it’s easier to peg what it isn’t than what it is. Director Hind Bensari follows Moroccan athlete Azzedine Nouiri as he trains for the 2016 Rio Paralympics. He’d already set a world-record for shot put at the 2012 games, but some extracurricular research tells me that Englishman Scott Jones bested him just a year later. Bensari prefers an elliptical, direct-cinema approach that forgoes these expositional niceties, which I think is a misstep when we see wheelchair user Nouiri ambulatory without any sort of elucidation. There are spectrums of disability that transcend the naked eye, but try telling that to the idiots who memed a woman in a wheelchair standing up to reach a bottle up high in a liquor store with jokes about her faking it. Nouiri is not faking it–classified as an F34 athlete (meaning he has “moderate to severe hypertonia in both legs”), he credits his disability, in a rare autobiographical aside, to keeping him off drugs in his junkie neighbourhood, though that begs the intervention of a filmmaker follow-up question, too. (“Why?”) Bensari respects her subjects’ reserve to the point of seeming incurious to a near perverse degree. As a conspicuously-disabled individual who’s subjected to 20 Questions pretty much every time he leaves the house, I wish more people were like her; as someone tasked with reviewing We Could Be Heroes, I wish she were less reverential. She has a habit of lingering long enough to normalize her subjects, which some may find suitably profound, but not a Frederick Wiseman length of time, which would allow the idiosyncratic details of the challenges they face to emerge organically.

Hot Docs ’18: Golden Dawn Girls

April 30, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, Finland, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018, Norway

***½/****
directed by Håvard Bustnes

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers The eponymous Golden Dawn girls are three women connected by marriage or blood to Greece’s relatively new but steadily growing Golden Dawn party. They’ve taken centre stage in the absence of the party’s male superintendents, who are all incarcerated. (As Norwegian director Håvard Bustnes says at the outset: More on that later.) The Golden Dawn party evolved from a far-right newspaper into a fascist movement, though its affiliates rabidly resist the Nazi stigma. Nazis, they say, were German–this is Greece. Nazis were National Socialists, Golden Dawn-ers are Social Nationalists. My favourite defense comes from Dafni, mother of jailed member Panagiotis Iliopoulos, who insists that her son couldn’t be a Nazi because he was born after WWII. In footage from a TV interview, Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris claims complete ignorance of this “Hitler” fellow when questioned about his “Sieg Heil” tattoo–“hail victory” simply seemed like a good message to spread via his arm. Asked why he had it written in German instead of Greek, then, he says the German font was an aesthetic preference. They have an answer for everything–never a good one, but typically one so literal-minded it shuts down discourse. Bustnes valiantly tries, over and over, to get them to budge, to confront their reflection–the image they present to the world.

The Neon Demon (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

October 5, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Horror, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Elle Fanning, Karl Glusman, Jena Malone, Keanu Reeves
screenplay by Nicolas Winding Refn and Mary Laws & Polly Stenham
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

by Walter Chaw There’s a quote from The Right Stuff I love that I thought about constantly during Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon: “There was a demon that lived in the air.” I found in it something of an explanation for, or at least a corollary to, the picture’s title, in that the demon in The Right Stuff refers to the sound barrier while the demon in Refn’s film refers to, perhaps, soft obstructions of other kinds. Artificially lit. Poisonous. The quote continues with “whoever challenged [the demon] would die…where the air could no longer get out of the way.” The first film I saw by Refn was Valhalla Rising, an expressionistic telling of the Odin myth–the part where he spent time on Earth (went missing, basically) before returning–that touches on the scourge of Christianity and how that relates to feeling lost, or losing what you believe in. Valhalla Rising led me to Bronson and to Pusher and then I followed Refn through Drive, which talks about the difficulties of being male, and Only God Forgives, which talks about the difficulties of being a son. Now there’s The Neon Demon, completing a trilogy of sorts by talking about the difficulties of being a girl becoming a woman and an object for men, eviscerated in certain tabernacles where women are worshiped as ideals and sacrificed to the same. It’s astonishing.

The Neon Demon (2016)

June 24, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, France, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Elle Fanning, Karl Glusman, Jena Malone, Keanu Reeves
Nicolas Winding Refn and Mary Laws & Polly Stenham
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

by Walter Chaw There's a quote from The Right Stuff I love that I thought about constantly during Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon: "There was a demon that lived in the air." I found in it something of an explanation for, or at least a corollary to, the picture's title, in that the demon in The Right Stuff refers to the sound barrier while the demon in Refn's film refers to, perhaps, soft obstructions of other kinds. Artificially lit. Poisonous. The quote continues with "whoever challenged [the demon] would die…where the air could no longer get out of the way." The first film I saw by Refn was Valhalla Rising, an expressionistic telling of the Odin myth–the part where he spent time on Earth (went missing, basically) before returning–that touches on the scourge of Christianity and how that relates to feeling lost, or losing what you believe in. Valhalla Rising led me to Bronson and to Pusher and then I followed Refn through Drive, which talks about the difficulties of being male, and Only God Forgives, which talks about the difficulties of being a son. Now there's The Neon Demon, completing a trilogy of sorts by talking about the difficulties of being a girl becoming a woman and an object for men, eviscerated in certain tabernacles where women are worshiped as ideals and sacrificed to the same. It's astonishing.

TIFF ’14: The Look of Silence

September 7, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, Taiwan, TIFF, UK

Senyap
****/****
directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

by Bill Chambers Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is devastating because it doesn’t offer any moral opposition to the glibly boastful first-hand accounts of Indonesian death squads; and his The Look of Silence is devastating because it does. A B-side to The Act of Killing but no mere Blue in the Face afterthought, The Look of Silence follows Adi, a 44-year-old door-to-door optometrist whose senile father is 103 and whose mother improbably claims to be around the same age. The father has forgotten but the mother has not that Adi was preceded by a brother, Ramli, who was killed during the “communist” purge (the picture reiterates that anyone who didn’t immediately fall in line with the military dictatorship was tarred with the same brush, regardless of political or religious affiliation)–though “killed” somehow undersells his execution, a two-day ordeal that culminated in Ramli’s castration. Adi watches Oppenheimer’s footage of the murderers describing his brother’s death in that animated, kids-playing way familiar from The Act of Killing, though these are not the same two “actors” who appeared in that film, underscoring that a desensitization to the atrocities committed has happened on a national, not individual, scale.

Breaking the Waves (1996) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

June 4, 2014****/****, 1990s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Denmark, Directors: Lars von Trier, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection

click any image to enlarge

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgård, Katrin Cartlidge, Udo Kier
screenplay by Lars von Trier and David Pirie & Peter Asmussen
directed by Lars von Trier

by Bryant Frazer Breaking the Waves can make you queasy from its opening moments, when director Lars von Trier's name appears with the title superimposed over it, the title card swaying gently on screen as if it were photographed at sea. The effect is less subtle on home video than it is on a big screen, where you're not as aware of the edges of the frame, but the message is the same: suddenly, you're adrift, unmoored, alone.

Nymph()maniac (2013)

March 21, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Directors: Lars von Trier, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical

Nymph()maniac: Vol. I
Nymph()maniac: Vol. II
***½/****
starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf
written and directed by Lars von Trier

by Angelo Muredda Partway through the second volume of Lars von Trier's surprisingly nimble Nymph()maniac, wounded storyteller Joe (three-time Trier MVP Charlotte Gainsbourg) tells her rapt listener Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) about the time she went to a support group for her sex addiction. When the group's straight-edge policy proved more than she could bear, Joe bowed out, but not before quipping that her fellow sufferers are nothing but "society's morality police, whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the earth so that the bourgeoisie won't feel sick." At last, one thinks, von Trier has found his ideal authorial surrogate in Gainsbourg, whose weird Brechtian delivery is halfway between earnest declaration and stiff high-school rendition of The Crucible. Von Trier has been a professional troll, masking his underlying seriousness with outré gestures, since long before he started sporting T-shirts emblazoned with "PERSONA NON GRATA," in tribute to Cannes' goofy decision to brand him uncouth for joking that his Wagner fixation owed to a latent penchant for Nazism. (All joshing aside, it obviously stung him.) But he's never shown himself to be as sophisticated at joking through tears (or crying through nasty punchlines) as he is in Nymph()maniac. Clocking in at over four hours in two rich parts, at least in the edited version debuting this weekend at Toronto's Lightbox, it's a landmark of seriocomic storytelling that is simultaneously a satire of biographical tall-tales, a depressive's bildungsroman, and an alternately tender and lacerating self-portrait, defending all the Joes and Larses of the world for their obscenity without sparing them the lash.

A Hijacking (2012)

August 16, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Kapringen ***/****
starring Søren Malling, Pilou Asbæk, Dar Salim, Roland Møller
written and directed by Tobias Lindholm

by Angelo Muredda Finely-tuned but incurious about most of what falls outside its blinkered gaze, A Hijacking is about as good as this sort of stripped-down procedural filmmaking gets–Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low reconfigured for a telephonic showdown between Somali pirates and Danish shareholders. Only the second feature from Tobias Lindholm (who proves much more capable as a director than as the author of The Hunt‘s lazy allegorical punts about the concern-trolling parents of small-town Denmark), the film feels like the work of a yeoman who’s in no hurry to be recognized as a visual stylist unless the material should merit such flourishes. Annoying as that no-frills approach can be in countless austere imitations of the Dardennes and Michael Haneke, it’s more than welcome here in a film whose title might otherwise have ended with a gaudy exclamation mark.

The Act of Killing (2012)

July 18, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Denmark, Documentary, Norway, UK

***½/****
directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

by Angelo Muredda Like Claude Lanzmann’s otherwise incomparable Shoah, Joshua Oppenheimer’s bracing documentary The Act of Killing reanimates a historical catastrophe without leaning on archival footage. In relying primarily on testimonials grounded at the site of violence, both films argue for a more radical than usual method of bearing witness to unspeakable genocides–in this case, the murder of nearly a million communists, intellectuals, and ethnic Chinese in mid-1960s Indonesia by a cadre of paramilitaries and gangsters who were backed by an American-funded military and subsequently never brought to trial. Yet as much as each project seeks to drag a monstrous past into the light by shooting at the present scene of the crime, Oppenheimer’s work is given an even more surreal kick by virtue of the incredible status still afforded to members of the killing squads, politically-connected goons who openly boast of their murders to anyone within earshot, including the film crew.

TIFF ’12: A Royal Affair

September 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

En Kongelig Affære
***/****
directed by Nikolaj Arcel

by Angelo Muredda A Royal Affair isn't exactly Barry Lyndon, but as period pieces go, it's surprisingly robust, the rare costume drama that takes a genuine interest in how the unruly personalities of rulers and politicians determine a nation's political outcomes as much as the ideologies they represent. It doesn't seem so promising at first, beginning as it does with a title card that sets the scene with ominous overtones. "It is the Age of Enlightenment," we're told in the tasteful font of "Masterpiece Theatre", and while the rest of Europe has gone through a massive philosophical and ethical shift with respect to its perception of peasants and landed gentry, Denmark has remained an outpost of the old, thanks in no small part to the conservative court that pulls the strings of mad young King Christian (Mikkel Følsgaard, Best Actor winner at Berlin). Enter his blushing new Welsh bride and our narrator, Caroline (Alicia Vikander), a revolutionary intellect–her book collection doesn't pass the Danish board of censors–who flounders in the country she now rules until things are livened by Johann Friedrich Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen), a German doctor and secret pamphleteer of the Enlightenment sent to bring sense back to the erratic King.

TIFF ’12: The Hunt

September 2, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

Jagten
**½/****
directed by Thomas Vinterberg

by Angelo Muredda The Hunt hinges on a misunderstanding, a nasty story born of a child's bruised ego and happily seized by a pack of overeager concern trolls calling themselves adults. But there's a whole other story about misunderstanding to be spun from how the film will surely be received in different quarters as either a devastating portrait of small-town life or a grim black comedy. That one is all on director and Dogme 95 cofounder Thomas Vinterberg. While it's always dicey to ascribe authorial intent, Vinterberg seems to waffle between middlebrow tragedy and scattershot satire not out of some postmodern commitment to walking the edge of irony, but because the script can't really sustain a further push in either direction. That makes The Hunt a provocative film, sure, but also a bit of a lazy one–a conversation starter without much follow-through.

Hot Docs 2012: Ballroom Dancer (ds. Christian Bonke and Andreas Koefoed)

April 25, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda Early in Christian Bonke and Andreas Koefoed’s Ballroom Dancer, we see 33-year-old Russian ballroom dancing champion Slavik tell his students that a dance between two people is an everyday story, not a big drama. The goal, he tells them, is to get on the other person’s wavelength. Slavik’s lesson is taken by Bonke and Koefoed’s film, which strives to get on the physical and emotional wavelengths of an aging artist who can’t get back to his salad days with former partner and reigning champion Joanna. His training sequences with new (younger) partner and lover Anna are rendered in dynamic camera movements that position the spectator as a surrogate partner in their tense mating dance, which yields disappointing results in competition. The filmmakers find a way to capture less obviously visually charged moments as well, framing Slavik and Anna in two-shots that emphasize their distance from one another even as they share the same space: Anna seems always to be hovering in the background on her Blackberry, eager for a window out. Slavik’s journey is a tricky one, then – a quest for self-mastery negotiated with another person who has her own set of goals.

Animal Kingdom (2010) + Valhalla Rising (2010)

August 11, 2010****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

ANIMAL KINGDOM
***½/****
starring Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Luke Ford, Guy Pearce
written and directed by David Michôd

VALHALLA RISING
****/****
starring Mads Mikkelsen, Maarten Stevenson, Gordon Brown, Andrew Flanagan
screenplay by Roy Jacobsen & Nicolas Winding Refn
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

by Walter Chaw David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom respects its audience, a rare commodity during the best of times. The film flatters us by leaving exposition and backstory to our knowledge of anthropology–in fact, Animal Kingdom is best indicated by its unwavering reserve–a reluctance, almost–to say too much when slow, fluid tracking motions and static, medium-distance establishing shots may suffice. Consider a frankly gorgeous tableau late in the film as three people meet in Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria: framed against an open space, Michôd allows an extra beat, then another, before continuing with his family gothic. The story isn’t an afterthought, but the dialogue, however minimal, seems to be. The picture’s told through its actions and its images and, in that way, reminds of a Beat Takeshi film, of all things, what with its focus on criminality and its enthralling slowness. If there’s another indie demiurge to which Michôd pays obeisance, it’s Michael Mann–and the success of the picture (as shrine to masculinity, as introspective character study) suggests that cribbing from Kitano and Mann, if it’s as successful a larceny as this, can be successful in no other way.

Dispatch from the 2010 WWSFF: Midnight Mania – Freaky

June 4, 20102000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Film Festivals, France, Israel, Japan, Norway, Short Films, Spain, Switzerland, UK

Click here to visit the Worldwide Short Film Festival‘s official website.

by Bill Chambers It’s tempting to say that pop already ate itself, leaving a vast wasteland of remakes and reboots that can’t possibly be fertile enough to cultivate imaginations; I sometimes lie awake worrying that one day all we’ll be left with is the vultures and their Jane Austen mashups, their homemade Lord of the Rings prequels and Sweded Rambo movies. Should such a Doomsday scenario come to pass, let’s hope it occasionally yields something as whimsical and obviously heartfelt as France’s The Little Dragon (Le petit dragon) (animated; d. Bruno Collet; 8 mins.; ***/****), in which a magical force brings a Bruce Lee action figure to life, seemingly with the legend’s identity, if not his soul, intact, as it is his impulse upon encountering a Chuck Norris cut-out to kick it down. (He also recognizes his name and image on other collectibles.) Decked out in his yellow Game of Death jumpsuit, he navigates a maze of cobweb-strewn movie memorabilia that appears to be some Harry Knowles type’s bedroom; in a moment of quintessentially French cinephilia, Bruce, having been passed the torch (the Statue of Liberty torch from a Planet of the Apes model kit, that is), stumbles on a makeshift crypt lined with dolls of Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Louise Brooks, Robert Mitchum, and, erm, Robert Taylor. The stop-motion animation is charming–this scrappy little guy may actually be the ne plus ultra of Lee imitators, who are of course legion–and the tone is deceptively irreverent. This is fan art, executed with gusto–but does it have a function? Collet could be the next Nick Park–but is he hurting for inspiration?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

April 1, 20102000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Germany, Mystery, Norway, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller

Män som hatar kvinnor
*/****
starring Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre, Peter Haber
screenplay by Nikolaj Arcel, Rasmus Heisterberg, based on a novel by Stieg Larsson
directed by Niels Arden Oplev

by Walter Chaw Slick and overproduced and poised for a David Fincher-helmed American redux, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor), Niels Arden Oplev's adaptation of the first of the late Steig Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy," falls off the exploitation tightrope. The titular malchick may be insane in the mainframe, but when she gets naked and straddles, cowgirl-style, an old guy while resisting even the notion of a committed relationship, it is only what it is. It doesn't matter what her issues are, in other words, because she's a hot twentysomething Goth-chick fantasy into computers and casual sex–and when I'm watching a representation of same, I'm not growing a conscience, I'm getting a hard-on. Imagine Elisha Cuthbert playing this role in the United States: on the one hand, it's theoretically harrowing to see her tied up and raped; on the other hand, I'm not complaining about seeing a hot twentysomething actress tied to a bed, completely prone and naked, pretending to be raped. It's the kind of playacting porn is discouraged from engaging in because it's actually too illicit for porn–but it's not too illicit for an arthouse import that's allegedly trying to have a conversation about what happens to little girls who are sexually abused.