CINEMA APORIA

watched in 8 March 2021

Unbearable drama, no less embarrassing than ironic. Mikkelsen is more than convincing drunk near the end of the film. Joachim (Nikolaj Lie) is spared the prolonged pain of trying every day of his life to pretend he is leaving Cecilie, whom he was supposed to marry on the very day he was run over by Marie, the doctor’s wife, satisfied.

The loop of coincidences in itself feeds the rawness of the drama, but the devastation of lives that the accident will entail is insignificant compared to the human reaction, both of the hit-and-run and paralysed man and the wife of the unfortunate victim who assumed that undressing in the hospital ward would lessen the disproportion of the irreversible misfortune, and of the doctor who attends despite dragging the happiness of his daughter and wife into his selfishness.

Cecilie’s role is impeccable, having just entered the hospital she was perplexed, but when she meets Niels, the doctor, and learns – simultaneously – that Joachim will never feel anything from the neck down, her countenance changes from anger and sadness to indifference until it reaches a depth that does not allow her to distinguish any moral premise when she begins to ask the doctor first to hug her and then to kiss him and call him at home to ask to see him. In fairness it is the doctor’s own rebellious daughter Stine, who shamefully surprises the father outside Cecilie’s flat. A relevant aspect: Joachim’s emerging condition of aggressiveness and the method of insulting his nurse so that she would tell him the truth: that the one who would almost be his wife no longer goes to the hospital and does not even check on him to see how he is doing.

Tag: Contemporary Scandinavian cinema