Just Another Love Story (Kærlighed på film, Denmark 2007): Part 2

Mette (Charlotte Fich) in Just Another Love Story

Rona reported on this film from the 2008 Edinburgh Film Festival. Now it’s out on release in the UK, it deserves a second look.

Watching Just Another Love Story is similar to being bound in front of the screen, having your eyes forced open and then being slapped across the face with a wet fish. It’s unsettling but riveting. I’m glad that with Nick I watched it on the big screen at the National Media Museum. This digital print looked stunning and the sound design was to die for.

I’ve seen several posts that suggest that the film is a remake or very similar to a Sandra Bullock film (While You Were Sleeping) that I haven’t seen and also Julio Medem’s Red Squirrel, which I have, but can’t remember very well. There is no doubt that in plot terms the film borrows from many other familiar narratives, but that’s inevitable since as one character actually remarks, that’s what films noirs are like. The important issue is that these are all familiar conventions, but they are presented with originality and skill.

It opens with a Sunset Boulevard reference and later I was reminded of three very different films, none of which are referenced directly, but it’s the kind of film that makes you search for memories – moments when you might have felt this before. I thought of Powell & Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (and possibly Denis Potter’s Singing Detective) with a character in hospital in a coma whilst the narrative goes on around them or where we see events and wonder whether they are really happening or if they are part of the delirium of one of the characters. Later, the plot begins to unfold with some similar ingredients to the Claire Denis film L’intrus and overall I also got the mystery and foreboding of a film like Mike Figgis’ Liebestraum.

The widescreen cinematography is terrific with great use of different textures for the Vietnam and Denmark scenes. The locations are carefully chosen with unsettling compositions in a morgue (the director’s speciality it would seem), on the shoreline and in the family home and its terrace. The sound design offers us overlaps between a past in Vietnam and a present in Copenhagen and in the thriller moments I had to close my eyes because the brutality on screen was so great – but this was pointless since it was the sickening sound of rock on flesh that was so terrible. The film is written and directed by Ole Bornedal and photographed by Dan Laustsen. There is no sound designer listed, but the sound crew certainly did a great job.

I have to endorse Rona’s praise for both Anders W. Berthelsen and Charlotte Fich and for the devastating way in which ‘ordinariness’ and domestic life are thrown into such confusion and terror. This is one of those films that some will find overblown and ridiculous (it’s a melodrama!) and others will love as being what cinema is all about. Which are you?

Edinburgh Film Festival 2009: Antichrist

Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist, photo by Christian Geisnaes

Antichrist has many of the qualities of previous Lars von Trier films and I have to use the ‘m’ word (‘misogyny’) immediately.  It came up quickly in the Q & A at Edinburgh with its cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle – and continued to come up during the subsequent discussion, and it was clear that many in the audience rightly had issues with its politics. I can only offer my view below, as someone who has frequently ‘had problems’ with Von Trier’s representations of women – and I‘ve found that (two days on) I’ve not quite had the response I would have expected. I hope that my few thoughts might stimulate some discussion because I think it’s an interesting and brave film. The furore at its release is interesting  as well, as it conforms to type. Without a comprehensive knowledge of the history of censorship, Antichrist falls into that category of film that creates a huge outcry, mainly from parts of the media that represent audiences who would never choose to go to see it and make it represent an evil that it simply does not equate to (Crash springs to mind as a worthy antecedent at the centre of a similar furore).

Antichrist is a powerful cinematic experience. The use of the image is tested to certain limits within a popular cinema context. Put this film in an art gallery, and you wouldn’t have the same kind of responses or issues. The fact that Von Trier chooses to work in a popular medium, deliberately with a view to changing the constitution and perception of that medium, means that his films can exist in a context that struggles to accommodate it. The particular challenge of his films is interesting when we are routinely able to ‘handle’ the unquestioned misogyny of mainstream cinema and extremes of representations of sex and violence that exist there. And it’s not that Von Trier’s film contains representations that are more realistic – as in the effects or results of violence or sexual obsession – the film is shot with his trademark attention to an ‘alienation effect’ to ensure that you are constantly aware that you are contemplating a work of art. And I mean ‘contemplating’ – Dod Mantle talked about the deliberate decision to slow the frame rate in order to allow the viewer to study the images being shown as you would contemplate a work of art in a gallery. Using high speed camera equipment (Phantom) some sequences were shot at 1,000 frames per second (compared to the usual 25).  It is similarly relevant that Von Trier does overtly credit the influence of Tarkovsky on this film. The particular quality of an artwork is, I think, enhanced as it is completely shot on digital. Other filmic devices Dod Mantle discussed were the deliberate decision to abandon the 180 degree rule in the sequences at the family home (post tragedy), which creates a dynamic contrast against the more static sequences. This was very clear as you watched it – the disintegration and the disassociation taking place within the marriage. This does work incredibly effectively as well as the single framing that results for each of the protagonists, emphasising their painful, painful isolation in this grieving couple. In lesser hands, it could just appear chaotic and disorientating. In the context of this, the female genital mutilation is not (as has been portrayed in some responses) the central narrative focus, but occurs at a specific narrative moment and expresses a particular emotion of Gainsbourg’s character. Is it gratuitous? I read an article in last week’s Observer Film supplement that felt it was, and decried the film’s casual use of it, quoting Ousmane Sembène Moolaadé as a far more sensitive treatment of this issue. This seems to imply that the film lacked humanity in its representation of its subjects. But this seems a different kind of human expression – of intense misery, grief – of darkness and despair – recreated through visual symbolism in a highly-aestheticised piece of art. Inevitably, it will always be testing and challenging our ability to feel connection – empathy, sympathy – because of this self-consciousness but I do not think it necessarily ‘achieved’ alienation. Somehow, through the extreme events and high art aesthetic, those people and their emotions were real. The intensity of the chamber-piece style and the particular actors involved is, as in other Von Trier films, a vital factor in that communicating the emotions convincingly. Despite what he must put them through, you would guess Von Trier is an actors’ director – the aesthetics serve the performance and foreground it rather than detract.

So, back to the misogyny. The narrative does superficially present a story that warns of the atavistic and illogical and dangerous influence and acts of women. A bald telling of the plot details would make this clear (which obviously I won’t do). However, this film (more than others I have watched by Von Trier) does create a powerful balance between its apparent mistrust of women and the ineffectual nature of patriarchal behaviour. Dafoe’s character is clearly the logic and control of male patriarchal authority which the film consistently questions, even whilst representing female extremes. It is clear that these extremes are produced in the context of this kind of patriarchal control and the lighting and colour choices emphasise the theme. The institutional look of the apartment they inhabit (the bathroom especially with the utilitarian basin and toilet and bland hospital-style tiles) together with the greenish colour bias seem to emphasise this unbalanced pathology within the marriage. The role of nature (conceived as its own separate character) is also a central theme – through the evil that men do, a battle between instincts and logic and a questioning of our relationship to the ‘beasts of the field’ – all represented visually in a highly aestheticised and anti-naturalistic form.

The final, fine balance is achieved through the dominance of the role ascribed to Charlotte Gainsbourg (who won the acting award at Cannes) compared to Dafoe – her dominance of the screentime and her devastating performance is a strong argument for credible female empowerment in this dark and challenging story.

Festen (Celebration, Denmark, 1997)

Happy families

The first film to be made under the constraints of the Dogme 95 manifesto, a back-to-basics anti-Hollywood statement, Festen certainly hasn’t dated. Watching it again I was struck by the tragic-comedic elements; the guests’ drunken and senile behaviour as well as the slapstick of the chasing around. I guess, the first time I was being overwhelmed by Christian’s revelations.

To what extent it is criticising the bourgeoisie, with their complacent reliance upon manners, or is specifically about Danish ceremonial tradition is not clear. It doesn’t matter; the representation of the absurd bourgeoisie is comparable with Buñuel.

The handheld camerawork is terrific throughout, the often angular compositions express the cataclysms the family are experiencing. However the film – a la Dogme – doesn’t eschew genre, it is melodrama to its core and certainly none the worst for that.

Myrin – Jar City (Iceland/Germany/Denmark 2006)

Ingvar E. Sigurdsson as Inspector Erlendur in Jar City

I don’t normally do this, but I watched the film of Jar City just days after finishing reading the book. This was preparation for an introduction to the film as an example of literary adaptation – something I’ve blogged on before.

A lttle background. Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indridason has produced a series of crime novels featuring Inspector Erlendur. The books have been extremely popular in Iceland and the first to be translated into English in 2004 carried the Icelandic title Myrin. In the UK it was published as Jar City. Ironically, the filmic adaptation is officially called Myrin – Jar City on the title-card for the BBFC certificate, but the novel has been re-published as Tainted Blood. Go figure, as the Americans say. I think ‘Myrin’ means ‘marsh’ in Icelandic and here it refers to an area in Reykjavik where a building houses a large number of medical specimens in in glass jars. Thus ‘Jar City’.

As an adaptation, the film is interesting in terms of the decisions taken over narrative structure, characters and presentation. I don’t want to spoil either the film or the book, so suffice to say, the film drops a sub-plot of no real narrative importance except to flesh out the story about Erlendur and his daughter Eva Lind and also re-orders events a little. The result in my view makes the film less of a procedural investigation and possibly a more familiar form of filmic narrative. I’m fine with this. I enjoy the slower pace of the procedural, but I recognise that it may not be something for a mainstream audience. It also goes with what I think is quite a clever attempt to make Erlendur a slightly more conventional investigator. (The novels portray a much more dishevelled, older man who forgets to eat properly and rarely has clean clothes – Ingvar (above) is quite striking without the heavy glasses and has a natty line in cardigans and parkas.) However, this ’softening’ is a matter of degree. The filmmakers have kept Erlendur’s junior partners much as described in the books (the two I’ve read so far). Sigurdur Oli is suitably Americanised and bumptious, while his female colleague Elinborg is happily an ‘ordinary’ and quite sensible woman. I confess that I had no real idea what she would look like, so the joke’s on me if I expected someone more glamorous.

Of course, outside Iceland this won’t be treated as a mainstream film, except perhaps in other ‘Nordic’ countries. Iceland itself has perhaps the highest cinema attendance per head of any country in Europe – perhaps in the world – so perhaps I shouldn’t expect anything other than a ciné literate film from Baltasar Kormakur, the director of 101 Reykjavik, the only other Icelandic film I think I’ve seen. That seemed quite hedonistic by comparison. In style terms, it’s noticeable that Jar City uses a CinemaScope frame, filling it with quite a few long shots of bare landscape and modern housing/offices, sometimes aerial shots and mostly cast in bluish/greenish light. I’ve not been to Iceland, but I could feel the cold and the wet. I could also smell it since this story rather overdoses on the olfactory. The other style feature is the use of music, at times quite obtrusive and sometimes using choral voices. I fear that to those outside Iceland, the music probably simply conveys a sense of Nordic solemnity – I couldn’t find out much about it, not even from the minimal press notes. This was one part of the film I didn’t understand. The opening and closing images feature close-ups of men in uniform singing outdoors as if in a choir on parade. The closing shots reveal that Erlendur is amongst them – so presumably it is a police choir or some form of ceremony at which the police are on parade. I have got some ideas, but I don’t want to spoil the film. If anyone can give me a clue that isn’t a spoiler, I’d be grateful. It’s an interesting element since the other Indridason book I’ve read focuses on a child who is a choral superstar, so it clearly has resonance for the local audience.

Back to the adaptation question. The film is, I think, more conventional in the way it presents the criminal activity that Erlendur investigates. There is little time to consider the serious ethical and sociological/political issues that the story raises. In the book, because Erlendur and the team struggle to get leads, it actually became more gripping. On the other hand, the realism of the film gives a much better sense of what Iceland might actually be like and what being a police officer in a country of only 320,000 must be like. As a vegetarian who lives in a sheep-rearing region, I’m still flashing back to the sight of Erlendur tucking into a boiled sheep’s head that he buys from a drive-thru. There is also a funny anti-vegetarian joke, but at least its at the expense of Sigurdur Oli.

As far as I can see, the collection of samples in Jar City and the associated research is a national issue since Iceland’s small population – sometimes considered the most developed society in the world – is the first to be properly classifiable as a genetic population. This raises quite a few potential questions. The other important theme is the contrast between ‘new’ and ‘old’ Iceland. The director has said that this is what attracted him to the character of Erlendur, who embodies many of the values of ‘old’ Iceland. His daughter represents ‘new’ Iceland – which does seem to have problems.

I’d recommend the film and the book.

(Apologies that I haven’t managed to represent Icelandic names properly – I haven’t managed to sort out my keyboard!)

Just Another Love Story (Kælighed pă film Denmark 2007)

Berthelsen: Danish Prince of Many Parts

Caught this Danish noir thriller (with definite melodrama tendencies) on a late showing at the Edinburgh Film Festival. It really reminded me Elsker dig for evigt (Open Hearts) (2002), where unconnected lives become intimately and dangerously intertwined through a chance, potentially tragic event. The films have a different filmic style, the earlier film being Dogme, whereas this later one uses some stylistic tricks, such as superimpositions, to match the heightened emotions. However, both films seem to have an ability brilliantly to bring out the banality of these events as well as their tragic significance.

The premise of the film is apparently far-fetched, that Jonas (Anders W. Berthelsen) feels responsible for an accident that has put Julia into a coma. On visiting her in hospital, he is mistaken for her boyfriend by her estranged family. Somehow the mistake is perpetuated, and it is the ordinariness of the man who finds himself in an extraordinary situation that was really affecting. That his increasing questioning of his own life and choices is completely believable is down to the performances by all the leads, not least Jonas’s wife (Charlotte Fich) who is blindsided by this change in their lives. Just as in Open Hearts and Drommen (2006), extremes are dealt with, but at a very human level.

It starts to make me wonder whether is almost a feature of Danish film narrative – a constant sense of the irony of their situation. (It weirdly reminds me of Hardy, where the plot events are almost devices, to explore the different responses of different characters to those extremes, to understand our flawed humanity more fully).

On a lighter note (!), I wonder what the Danish film industry would do without its most reliable asset – Berthelsen – who must have crossover potential (as Mads Mikkelsen from Open Hearts clearly had for the Bond franchise recently). He has appeared in other independent pieces such as the British film Blinded which premiered at the festival in 2005 (but despite Peter Mullan and Jodhi May seemed to disappear) and had a role in Kathryn Bigelow’s underrated Shreve adaptation The Weight of Water. However, he clearly is focussed on turning in vital leading man performances for recent Danish cinema.

Drømmen (We Shall Overcome Denmark/UK 2005)

Anders Berthelsen as Freddie, the teacher who encourages Frits (Janus Dissing Ratke)

(An amended version of notes for an evening class.)

Denmark has an interesting cinematic history, as a small country with a Scandinavian language, but a border with Germany. Denmark produced one of the first stars of early cinema with the widespread acclaim for Asta Nielsen in the first Danish feature films from 1910-13. The early success of Danish producers could not be sustained and Nielsen worked in Germany from 1913, becoming a major figure in silent cinema. Carl Dreyer (1898-1968) is perhaps the most famous Danish filmmaker, but his best known films were made in other languages such as French or German.

Since the 1940s Denmark has consistently produced around 20 feature films each year, mostly for Scandinavian markets. In the 1980s two Danish films won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, Babette’s Feast (1987) and Pelle the Conqueror (1988). These were both historical dramas and it wasn’t until the 1990s that Lars von Trier and his colleagues began to put contemporary Denmark onto the world’s screens.

In 1991 von Trier had a critical and commercial success with Europa (Zentropa), a Danish/Swedish/French/German/Swiss co-production in English and German. This was followed by a successful TV series (known as The Kingdom in the UK) in 1994, made by the production company Zentropa Entertainments that von Trier founded with Peter Aalbæk Jensen. This company has subsequently produced all of von Trier’s films and those of many other Danish filmmakers.

In 1995 Lars von Trier and colleagues Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring, and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen formed the Dogme Collective. The basic premise was that filmmakers should dispense with most of the trappings of mainstream cinema except for believable characters and a story that was in no way contrived. Films that fulfilled the strict rules of the Dogme ‘Vow of Chastity’ received a certificate from the group. Whatever Dogme achieved in terms of changing attitudes towards filmmaking (and there are plenty of sceptics as well as supporters, it proved to be an excellent means of promoting Danish films internationally. Journalists everywhere had a handy label to pin to films they were willing to discuss as ‘Dogme’ films. Perhaps a dozen, mostly Danish, films have been widely seen internationally as Dogme films, but hundreds more have received some kind of ‘promotion by association’.

We Shall Overcome
Niels Arden Oplev’s film is not a Dogme film (historical or costume pictures are not allowed), but it was produced by Zentropa Entertainments and it has certainly benefited from the high profile Danish films have achieved on the festival circuit as a result of the Dogme phenomenon. Getting your film seen is always difficult and Zentropa’s connections mean that Danish films like this have an advantage over other films from relatively small film industries.

Based on a true story, We Shall Overcome is a feelgood drama focusing on an incident in a Danish village school in the late 1960s in which a young boy Frits stands up to one of his teachers on a matter of historical accuracy. The incident snowballs into a major confrontation. The boy is close to his father who suffers a mental breakdown and has to spend time in hospital. In thematic terms it brings together three social issues including corporal punishment, attitudes to mental illness and the social liberation movements of the late 1960s which were inspired by the Civil Rights movement in the US and the Vietnam War protests across Europe. In Denmark, the social revolution had an internationally visible representation in the hippy community in Christiania, which was founded in 1971 when squatters on state-owned land in Copenhagen set up an alternative community. Freddie, the teacher in We Shall Overcome, is presented as a forerunner to the hippies of this community. Importantly, he is associated with the international peace movement and a more politically aware outlook compared to the hippies. Nevertheless, he will ‘fail’ the central character Frits at a crucial time.

The film is ‘feelgood’ because its ‘liberal’ views on social issues are now generally supported and the narrative effectively pushes us to support the boy and his family at the centre of the story in their struggle against a conservative and repressive school system. The film also develops other elements often found in European films. One is the 1960s optimism founded in American popular culture, especially black culture. An obvious connection might be made to the early films of Wim Wenders such as Summer in the City (1970), Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976), all using images of America (and its music) to comment on contemporary life in West Germany. Just as the French New Wave directors explored aspects of American culture in order to critique traditional approaches to cinema, this film uses the Civil Rights movement in order to challenge the social order. It is also worth remembering that in many parts of Europe the development of television as a mass entertainment form took longer than in the US and the UK.

In commercial terms, We Shall Overcome also attempts to attract two separate audiences. Younger audiences might identify directly with Frits and the schoolchildren, whereas for those over forty, the film evokes nostalgia for what might now seem a more optimistic time when protest could bring about change. (The director was born in 1961 and claims that the film was very much influenced by his own memories.)

One of the important issues for British audiences to consider is that this film belongs alongside a growing number of films that are child or youth-centred. In the Scandinavian countries in particular and Europe in general, there is far more attention paid to ‘children’s film’. This often means relatively serious films by comparison with those from Hollywood, although there are similarly escapist films as well. UK audiences have got used to the idea that ‘children’s film’ means animation or fantasy adventure. There are relatively few ‘British’ rather than American films that are seen by younger audiences in Britain. In the past, the UK had the Children’s Film Foundation which made professionally-produced films for children on relatively small budgets. This ran from 1951 until the early 1980s with some public funding. Otherwise in the UK, children have been neglected as the central characters in mainstream features. Older youths in UK pictures have traditionally appeared in ‘social problem’ films – ideologically quite different in their approach to youth issues to films such as We Shall Overcome. There is now something of a movement in the UK to promote Children’s Films again and in the last few years a number of children’s film festivals have developed, notably Cinemagic in Northern Ireland and two in Yorkshire – the Leeds Children and Young People’s Film Festival and Showcommotion in Sheffield. Both these festivals are part of the European Children’s Film Network. It’s worth visiting the website at http://www.ecfaweb.org/ecfnet/films.php to see the range of films produced in recent years.

Films like We Shall Overcome have attracted middle-class audiences to new versions of ‘Saturday morning cinema’ (in arthouse cinemas like London’s Barbican Cinema), once a staple of working class life in the UK in the 1950s. But might the film have a wider audience if it was dubbed? The sub-plot around the new approach to teaching music is very recognisable from Hollywood films such as School of Rock (US 2003). However, Variety’s critic Leslie Felperin suggested after a festival screening that the film “has a feelgood factor that can win hearts and minds on the fest circuit and secure some theatrical bookings, but isn’t sufficiently revolutionary to conquer farther flung territories”. I don’t agree – I think this film could have wide appeal.

Finally, we should note the co-production credit for Glasgow-based Sigma Films. There are strong connections between Zentropa and various Scottish production groups. These have seen some high profile projects such as Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (UK/Denmark 2006) and Lone Scherfig’s Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (UK/Denmark 2002).

Roy Stafford 13/2/07