When "revolutions" happen in art, it is usually just a reactionary, old wine on new bottles, "back to basics" kind of move. The 1980´s had the grunge revolution in music, which was just a reactionary move back to simplicity and a killing of aesthetics. Something similar happened around the middle of the 1990´s in danish film, more notably the "Dogme" movement.
This was a manifesto-driven attempt to return film-making back to its youthful and awe inspiring magic, by stripping away all time consuming eye-candy production and minutia of politically correct structure. The focus would then automatically turn back to storytelling and impulsiveness. But even before the Dogme movement took of, a seemingly insignificant simplistic movie gained surprising attention in 1997. It actually paved the way for the success of the Dogme movies soon to come.
Julie (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is a young female artist, who has just been kicked out of a relationship with her photographer artist friend. She is unable to process it in a mature and self-reflective fashion and is absorbed by hate and revengefulness. At the same time a male friend Mogens (Bjarne Henriksen) has been sleeping on the sofa in her apartment for years and his two friends keep showing up now feel entitled to come and go in her apartment as they please.
She apparently has a problem with handling men as responsible adults, shown by both her inability to proces the breakup but also her need to surround herself with male losers she can "raise", to make her feel superior and on top of things . Her philosophy towards understanding men clearly revolves around sex. She does not understand male sexuality and asks Mogens why big tits turn him on when she borrows some of his porn magazines for her collage art. Art, as i have stated before, is a way of trying to step into other peoples lives or at least reflecting on your relations. She discusses having taught pussy-licking to her former boyfriend with a girlfriend and how she feels that another girl now gets the fruits of her "work". Apparently she can only view a relationship as a win-lose negotiation.
The three men in her apartment have never had anyone showing them how to be a grown-up. They behave like overgrown teenage boys, with their football addiction and their lack of male assertiveness or purpose in life. They are all portraid as immoral losers, who will cheat their way to scholarship money, peeping at girls through their window to get inspiration to a novel or steal a famous footballer´s shoes. They live in the fantasy that they can get cheap money or cheap women as if they are entitled to it. This is basically a female trait projected onto men.
Julie is also a looser, but she blames it on her surroundings and not herself. At least the men accept their fate and let things happen as they come along and they all eventually get resolved some way or another, despite how superficial their goals may be. At least they evolve a bit during the film. Julie is stationary and her story is not developed or rounded of. The collage she is working on is not developed, her relation with her ex-boyfriend is not resolved and her relation with the three men is not developed further either. It seems that the story is cut short, but i think the purpose is to let the (primarily female) viewer think the rest for herself. Let the possible outcomes form in the viewers mind and build from that.
There is much to like about this film. It is in black and white, which is a reactionary statement itself, towards simplicity and wiping the slate clean. There are many scenes that are clearly improvised but these are in my opinion some of the best parts and they add a rare sense of honesty and truthfulness. The actors were not aware that this would eventually turn into a feature length movie so they are very loose in their style.
The somewhat disorganized structure does rely too much on "pulp fiction"-like funny dialog. It seeks to soothe the audience, but it does not do much more than confirm prejudices and pull a bit towards politically correct gynocentrism in the way that men are held down to make the women look superior. This has been a trend since the late 1950´s and now it enters into the new millennium.
This could have been a potentially very good film, but sadly it does not venture deeper than making sure that no one, especially women, are challenged in their way of understanding relations between the sexes. It is exactly just the same old format that is exaggerated by making caricatures of everyone involved and skipping ahead every time the possibility to dig under the surface arrives.
The film did sort of start the new wave of danish Dogme movies unintentionally and at the same time launched the involved actors careers into a new orbit. It was recorded in less than two weeks and showed that art does not have to be big production to be interesting or involving. For that it gets a lot of credit.
Rating: 7/10
