Review of Martin Skovbjerg’s “Copenhagen Doesn’t Exist”

Martin Skovbjerg’s film Copenhagen Doesn’t Exist is released. At a glance Mikhail Trofimenkov, it perfectly fits the criteria of the average Scandinavian narrative: trying to be at the same time a story of crazy love, a mosaic thriller, a metaphysical parable and just a beautiful picture, the film hangs in the inter-intelligent space between genres.

Sander (Jonas Holst Schmidt) and Ida (Angela Bundalovich) accidentally met their eyes on the street and – let’s take the director’s word for it – fell in love with each other with such love, which only happens in fairy tales. The stories are cruel. One terrible morning, Sander woke up in their country hut on the banks of a beautiful river and did not find Ida next to him.

The intrigue does not emerge immediately, in fragments. Skovbjerg chooses a mosaic structure. Here is a flashback, there is a freeze-frame from the past flashed for a second in Sander’s grief-blocked brain, or an innocent phrase that comes to mind, to which the tragedy gives new meaning. Skovbjerg, like a seasoned investigator, spins the client in an implicit status – whether the victim, or the suspect – into everyday trifles, from which, the devil knows, something might turn out. Another thing is that the investigator a priori will not believe a single word of Sander. And Skovbjerg, not risking entering into a complex but fascinating game of “believe it or not” with his hero, offers to believe at least his visual memory.

Skovbjerg hasn’t even ventured to hide the metaphor “the director is the investigator” into the subtext. The film is structured like an interrogation. Ida’s father (Zlatko Buric) and Ida’s brother locked Sander in their spacious apartments and subjected him to psychoanalysis under video recording. No violence, all in good faith. Only now, when you see Papa Porat, a gray-haired boar, a Balkan bomb, whose fuse can be blown at any moment, you somehow don’t want to disagree with his proposal. Porat is the only one who lives on the screen, and not just tramples, cherishing universal and inexplicable sadness in his eyes.

Claustrophobia does not threaten Sander. He just changed one “prison” for another. Ida’s apartment, where he moved soon after they met – fortunately he had not paid for his own housing for four months – became a voluntary prison for them. He doesn’t need to go to work: let’s believe the guy that “he used to be a writer.” Ida walked for the first time, then stopped. He broke up with his friends, whether she had friends, God knows. For a couple of years they went to visit, but the owners turned out to be terrible “philistines”: they chat about design and work, unable to comprehend the great metaphysics of love. Well, lovers don’t answer the phone either.

It is in this that Porat sees the key to the mystery. Do not understand the old man, how you can isolate yourself from the world. I didn’t watch, I suppose, “The Last Tango in Paris”, but Skovbjerg did. At the beginning of the film, Sander looks out over the urban landscape with his face twisted, as if he is about to scream, as Marlon Brando once screamed. Times were wild then, sexually revolutionary: no one is screaming in the street now. And Sander is skewed because his father has just died. Hero Brando has just lost his wife. And both had the misfortune on such a day to meet a woman who could replace everything and everyone in the world. Until, of course, the hour of mortal reckoning comes.

But the heroes of Tango had something to pay for: the epic of wild sex in a random abode was worth it. And what are Danish lovers paying for and what is so fatal in their novel? If you turn off the painful music and the mournful otherworldly voice of Ida, broadcasting nonsense from heaven, and focus on visual details, a terrible secret will be revealed: there is no secret in the heroes. Ordinary, relatively young people, not bad, perhaps, but completely senseless, idle, cherishing their fictional complexes, considering the vulgar world unworthy of them. Incapable even of bed feats in the spirit of “Tango”. Everything in their life is sweet, cool, cozy, and with the passage of time, from an outsider’s point of view, more and more unbearable. Cut your favorite hair, listen to Bach through headphones, eat ice cream, take a walk along the beach. It’s not even a matter of a shortage of external events: one simply cannot believe that the heroes have an inner life so intense that it cannot be resolved otherwise than by a catastrophe. However, if, as the title of the film says, the scene itself does not exist, then what can be the claims to the humanoid shadows wallowing in the wasteland.