Varyag out of turn – Newspaper Kommersant No. 192 (7393) of 10/17/2022
[ad_1]
Thomas Daneskov’s film “The Wild Man” was released. Despite the fact that his genre is declared as a comedy, the Danish director turned out to be rather a sad statement of the crisis of modern masculinity – even a conditionally happy ending does not save from disappointing conclusions on this score. Tells Yulia Shagelman.
On a rock overgrown with forest, hanging over the mirror-like waters of the Norwegian fjord, a brutal man in skins, with a bow behind his back, sits and bursts into tears – either from the unbearable beauty of the surrounding landscape, or from some spiritual wounds unknown to the audience. This behavior, frankly, does not fit well with stereotypical ideas about the harsh Vikings. But Martin (Rasmus Bjerg) is not really a Viking. He is a completely ordinary Dane of the 21st century, an office worker who fled into the woods from a prosperous middle-class life (and most importantly, from a wife with whom, bad luck, you have to talk about something) in search of his male identity. Jogging in the morning and doing triathlons did not help, so Martin decided to fall back to his roots and live like his ancestors a thousand years ago – in unity with nature, feeding on hunting and gathering. True, he did not completely refuse the gifts of civilization, taking with him a tent and a mobile phone.
When our hero, having suffered a predictable failure in his attempts to shoot a deer with a bow, goes out in search of food to a gas station shop, it turns out that he left his wallet at home. The seller refuses to accept the skin or stone ax in exchange for food, a rather ridiculous fight for resources ensues, from which Martin emerges victorious, dragging the prey into the forest. However, now it is not only his wife who is looking for him, but also the Norwegian police, who in this wilderness are represented by only three ministers of the law: the head of the only district in the whole district, Oyvind (Bjorn Sundqvist), who has nothing left before retirement, and his two clumsy subordinates, unable to , seems to find not only a person in the forest, but also noses on their own faces.
Unfortunately, the daring theft of a package of beer, chips and chocolates is not the only case that this team will have to investigate. While Martin is portraying the “Survivor” with an iPhone, on a mountain road, a car in which three men of a clearly criminal type are riding collides with an elk (that’s just what he wants to sympathize with in this situation). The police discover an already empty and abandoned car. For the time being, it is not known where two of her passengers disappeared, but the third, Musa (Zaki Youssef), goes into the forest and, of course, meets Martin there. They easily find a common language: Musa is also utterly tired of the demands that modern life makes on a man (for example, that he work and be a responsible father to a two-year-old son). At the same time, he “forgets” to tell a new friend that instead of permanent employment, he works as a drug courier and carries with him a bag with money received for transporting hashish from Denmark to Norway. And this bag, in turn, is being searched for by his “colleagues”, whom he mistakenly considered dead in the accident.
On purely formal grounds, the second full-length work of the young director Daneskov may remind other Scandinavian black comedies about men in crisis that recently hit the Russian box office: Thomas Vinterberg’s One More Time (2020) and Anders Thomas Jensen’s Knights of Justice (2020). There, too, representatives of the not so strong, as it turned out, sex tried to escape from reality – some in experiments with alcohol, some in criminal showdowns. Both were less frightening for them than the need to talk to wives and children and generally somehow be present in family life.
But, unlike the characters of these paintings, the characters of the “Wild Man” do not cause the slightest sympathy, which is to blame for both the exceptional lack of charm among the performers and poorly written characters. What, in fact, so oppresses Martin? Why did Musa get involved in crime, not because of his nationality (it would be completely politically incorrect to assume this)? The script by Daneskov and Morten Pape leaves gaping holes in the places where the background and motivation of the characters should be, and without emotional attachment, watching the forest adventures of two “sofa warriors” is not at all so interesting.
As a result, in addition to the innocently killed moose, one can only feel the location in the entire film towards the elderly policeman Oyvind. He practically voices the thoughts that arise during the viewing that the rest of the heroes with their games of Vikings and tough guys are toiling with perfect nonsense. He, by no coincidence, I think, is the only one who is not afraid to talk with his wife (albeit long dead) and is able to admit his own mistakes, and not blame others for them, progress, social networks, changing gender roles and the devil in mortar. And that’s what makes him a real man – that is, if you believe the film (although oh how you don’t want to believe it), a representative of a rare and endangered species.
[ad_2]
Source link
