RECONSTRUCTION
Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Palm Pictures
Grade: B+
Directed by: Christoffer Boe
Written by: Chriftoffer Boe, Mogens Rukov
Cast: Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Maria Bonnevie, Krister Henriksson,
Nicolas Bro
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 9/1/04
Let's say you just dropped off your date and, tired, you head
home by taxi. You realize you left your wallet in the room and
ask the cabbie to wait while you head up to retrieve it. You did
drink a little too much, but that does not explain why the door of
your apartment has shrunk to one-third of its size, why your
landlady says she had never seen you before in her life, and your
neighbor, whom you ask to borrow a few bucks for the waiting
car, is ready to kick you, a stranger, out bodily. This sounds like
a typical Twilight Zone serial and you almost hear dee dee dee
dee/ dee dee dee dee in your head, as you have completely lost
your identity.
In his challenging debut feature, director Christofffer Boe, using
a script co-written by Mogens Rukov, does give considerable
emphasis to a Twilight Zone-ish plot, but uses the sci-fi angle
merely as a successful plot device to examine the nature of love,
choice, and fate. "Reconstruction" transcends the science fiction
genre to posit a romantic story of a man who, having to choose
between his regular girlfriend and an enchanting woman he
meets in a bar, must decide with which woman he wants to
spend perhaps the rest of his life.
Though the film is open to audience interpretation and while the
director himself wants us to be free to make our own judgment,
this appears to be what goes on in this thought-provoking story--
which is told not within the rigid conventions of a narrative but in
the free style similar to techniques used by French New Wave
filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffait, Louis Malle,
Eric Rohmer and Agnes Varda during the mid-fifties and sixties.
August Holm (Krister Henriksson),a successful author, returns
to his hotel room unexpectedly early to discover the bedsheets
rumpled on both sides and a little note on the dresser in a
strange handwriting, "see you at 13.00." His wife, Aimee (Maria
Bonnevie), has obviously had a one-night stand. Determined to
get revenge on her new lover, he sits down and takes some
notes for a new book or short story, trying several drafts including
one which has his wife desert him for the handsome stranger,
Alex (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), and another that features his wife's
sticking by him, dumping her lover without much regret. In order
to block even his wife's memory of the younger man, he regularly
starts writing afresh, wiping out the memory of everyone with
whom Alex comes into contact, including his neighbors and, most
important, the author's wife and the stranger's girlfriend, Simone
(played also by Maria Bonnevie as a doppleganger). Ah what
revenge!
There are more layers to the tale. Perhaps the entire episode
has been a figment of this author's appropriately feverish
imagination, or then again, maybe not a single event has
anything to do with the book he is writing–which, given the
memory loss of Alex's contacts--seems the less probable
interpretation.
No matter how you look on this picture which evokes David
Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" (an actress arrives in Hollywood and
tries to solve the mystery of an amnesiac woman's identity),
"Reconstruction," which deals with the reconstruction from the
bottom up of a man's relationships, embraces the French New
Wave, brushing aside of the rigidities of narrative structure.
Story aside, photographer Manuel Alberto Claro uses deliberately
grainy takes to give the story a noir quality, enveloping a
Copenhagen neighborhood largely in a sickly greenish tint. In an
interview, Alberto Claro notes that director Christoffer Boe was
always "a loner and in opposition to what everybody did...From
day one he knew that his films were not going to look like
anybody else's." While some in the audience may find this
Lynch-like feature pretentious, there is evidence that Boe
embraces pretension as a plus, giving us in the audience
something to chew on besides popcorn.
The film is subtitled in English with characters speaking Danish
and, in the case of our female doppleganger, Ms. Bonnevie, a
softer and more romantic Swedish.
Not Rated. 90 minutes. © 2004 by Harvey Karten
at harveycritic@cs.com
========== X-RAMR-ID: 38574 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1316257 X-RT-TitleID: 1133634 X-RT-SourceID: 570 X-RT-AuthorID: 1123 X-RT-RatingText: B+
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