Interrogation with insensibility – Weekend

Martin Skovbjerg’s Copenhagen Doesn’t Exist is a convoluted thriller about a pair of lovers lost in powerful emotions or the Danish landscape. Eskil Vogt, screenwriter of The Worst Man in the World, is trying to resurrect the searching spirit of the late 20th century, when what was filmed seemed truer than reality.

Text: Alexey Filippov

The film ended and the audience went out into the street. She hesitated, still unimpressed by what she had seen. He looked around, as if about to do something illegal, and said hello. He asked her how the movie was. Introduced himself. Invited for coffee. She responded with an ambiguous grimace. I wanted to leave, but for some reason changed my mind and agreed.

So, according to the memoirs of Sander (Jonas Holst Schmidt), their romance with Ida (Angela Bundalovich) began to spin. About two years later, he is alone again in Copenhagen, trying to figure out where she has gone. He has lengthy conversations with her father Porat (Zlatko Buric) and brother Viktor (Wilmer Trier Bregger) in a semi-abandoned apartment owned by the family. In one room, all the furniture is collected, covered with a cloth, in the second – emptiness with paintings and windows. Not housing, but a loneliness furniture with a pantry of memories and a hall of an empty consciousness. Porat and Viktor politely ask Sander every day where Ida could have gone and what their relationship was like. He seems to sincerely, but not very informatively, answers – as if remembering a dream that eludes the eyes of his unstuck eyes.

Copenhagen Doesn’t Exist is the second feature film by Martin Skovbjerg, the new hope for Danish cinema. Eskil Vogt’s screenplay based on the novel “Sunder” by the Norwegian journalist Terje Holtet Larsen bribed him with an avalanche of intrigue, and the shooting of the picture about intimacy, which cannot be described in words, fell at the height of the pandemic. By the premiere in Rotterdam, the insulating haze has slightly dissipated, although alienation and otherness in the big city persist in any setting. Even if it’s not about love, which you want to hide behind tightly drawn curtains.

The relationship between Ida and Sander is full of omissions, projections and fantasies. Firstly, these are purely his memories of the girl who replaced the whole mortal world for him. Secondly, he tries to retell the events to two worried men who are looking for clues – where Ida could have gone. Coming into contact with reality, these scenes turn into mumbling and nonsense: “Bach,” Sander suddenly recalls, as if a secret fact, “This is her favorite composer.” The very first thing he told the “supervisors” was how he had been looking out the window for days on end, waiting for Ida to return from work. Everyday life is not a lover, but a pet. Beyond the threshold and without a hostess – the world ends, everything loses its meaning and shape.

The presence in the frame of Bundalovich, Buric and the Danish capital, starring in the recent series Copenhagen Cowboy by Nicolas Winding Refn, seems to highlight the deceptive relationship of these two Danish dreams, each of which is nightmarish in its own way. However, Vogt’s script is far from Refn’s odyssey of revenge, filmed in the aesthetics of neo-noir paroxysm. This is a mirror maze where a 20-year-old lost young man looks at a girl who is considered a disease in the family, and the eyes of her father and brother are fixed on him, as well as a video camera that broadcasts his facial expressions during the “interrogation” on a pot-bellied TV.

Rashomon from the VHS era, although everyone, even the disconnected from the world and the Ida family, walk around with smartphones. From their ideas about her, three men are trying to make a psychological portrait of a fugitive, to concoct an identikit of her soul, but they constantly come to a standstill. Their Ida wouldn’t do that. Their Ida is a sparrow in the palms, in need of a loving look and nothing more. Their Ida is not what she seemed. Even Sander, who lies about what happened, straining all the not so abundant fantasy of the ex-writer, who then parted with his whole past life at the cinema.

From a different era and the plot of Vogt, screenwriter of “Thelma” and “The Worst Man in the World” by Joachim Trier, who nurtured the idea for more than 10 years before Skovbjerg took up the script. “Copenhagen Doesn’t Exist” is closer in spirit to the expressive fantasies about sex, lies and videos that flourished at the turn of the present and past millennia. Kieślowski’s color trilogy about women and devastating feelings, the neo-baroque “Bad Blood” by Carax, Karvai’s VHS fantasy “Chongqing Express” or the intricate “Reconstruction” by the Dane Kristoffer Boe.

This is a movie so late – both to pandemic intimacy and romantic deconstruction – that it may be on the crest of some new wave. Waves of new uncertainty about reality. That if you close your eyes, Copenhagen will continue to exist.

In theaters from June 22

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