Rasmus Bruun and Frederik Cilius Jørgensen in “The St. Bernard Syndicate.” credit: Meta Film Rights
Truly enjoyable comedies are really hard work for the people creating them, make no mistake, and the successful ones, more often than not, have earned your laughs and admiration. But their success or failure almost always relies on the concept of the suspension of disbelief; the audience’s willingness to forgive the less believable circumstances of the overall narrative because of their identification with the humanity of the characters and/or their sympathies towards the side of the conflicts those characters find themselves struggling with. Danish director Mads Brügger, who has seen some success as a documentary filmmaker who’s not shy about injecting black humor into his work, directs his first feature film, The St. Bernard Syndicate (Denmark, 2018) with a seemingly clear eye for deadpan sad-sack humor.
Frederik (Frederik Cilius Jørgensen) is a young idea man who pitches his latest money-making scheme at a seminar with his fellow alumni at his high-falutin’ business school – breed and sell St. Bernards to the Chinese! They love dogs, they love novelty, and there’s a family-bonding angle that all of those rich Chinese people won’t be able to resist… right…?! Frederik only finds one dubious angel – Rasmus (Rasmus Bruun), a pale and dorky nerd who has just received a dire medical prognosis (unbeknownst to Frederik), and decides to spend his inheritance on this just-crazy-enough-to-work flyer in hopes of leaving his own solitary legacy of success.
We quickly learn that neither of them is very good at any of this… a little knowledge is, indeed, a dangerous thing. The film is a dry-as-a-bone chronicle of their futility – there are few, if any, broad strokes of farce or slapstick. Brügger, like many northern European filmmakers, experiments with how dark-and-disappointing he can go and still keep things funny. His actors are quite good, the selfless Bruun especially, but I ran out of interest sooner than I suspect many other viewers will. If you’re a fan of the Ricky Gervais / Larry David school, and you think drunk people are funny, then this is in your wheelhouse. Brügger is clearly a deliberate and enthusiastic pro, and he and screenwriter Lærke Sanderhoff will likely do better work down the line.
Reimo Sagor in “Take It Or Leave It.” credit: kinoveeb.delfi.ee
Estonia’s Foreign Film submission to this year’s Oscars, Take It Or Leave It (Võta Või Jäta) (Estonia, 2018) is an impressively well-observed domestic drama from writer/director Liina Trishkina-Vanhatalo, another documentary veteran making her feature debut.
Erik (the terrific Reimo Sagor) is a typical young construction guy who works hard and parties a little harder. He’s called one morning to the hospital by one of his more serious regular flings, Moonika (Liis Lass), who introduces Erik to their newborn female child (with no advance notice or consultation) and announces that she wants no part of her. Erik battles with his feelings, weighs his alternatives, gets lots of fair advice, and chooses to completely change his life and raise the baby girl himself.
It could be the entr’acte for a torrid soap-opera, a heartfelt tearjerker or a wry examination of masculinity. But true to her documentarian instincts, Trishkina-Vanhatalo keeps her film observational and judgement-free, letting accumulating details and her actors’ smart choices flush out her terrific screenplay. There is absolutely nothing remotely predictable here. She gets able assistance from cinematographer Erik Põllumma’s visual finesse, and her actors are reliable throughout, especially Reimo Sagor, who is in almost every frame of the film and carries the burden with weirdly insistent taciturn charm. I highly recommend it.
Zahraa Aldoujaili and Yara Aliadotter in “Amateurs.” credit: efp-online.com
The sharp and discerning Swedish filmmaker Gabriela Pichler’s second feature, Amateurs (Amatörer) (Sweden, 2018) starts out loose and anarchic, but settles in as an impressively well-woven comic chronicle of diversity and community.
The tiny Swedish town of Lafors is dying the slow death of many one-industry small towns – here it’s cowhide and leather processing – but the city’s also in the running for a new gigantic low-cost superstore that’ll bring hundreds of new jobs. The city doesn’t have much of a budget to promote their town to the corporation, but one of the officials, Musse (Fredrik Dahl), suggests having high-school kids submit cell-phone movies in a Lafors-themed competition. Among those accepting the challenge are extremely close friends Aida (Zahraa Aldoujaili) and Dana (Yara Aliadotter), and we follow along with them as they ardently capture their everyday view of their hometown. The city officials, however, aren’t remotely interested in the indulgences and rough edges of the high-school submittals, and hire a semi-professional filmmaker to shoot a far more idealized representation. But Aida and Dana don’t take this rejection calmly, and continue to shoot in defiance of the other squeaky-clean version, capturing their own immigrant-family experiences, letting their local subjects shoot some of their own vignettes and having conversations with the townspeople on what the real consequences of the superstore’s arrival might be.
The set-up (in the screenplay by Pichler and Swedish novelist Jonas Hassen Khemeri) sounds formulaic, even Capra-esque – the integrity of little guy small-town values versus the soulless capitalist supercorporation. But viewing it through the story of Aida and Dana (and Musse as well) brings us into another level of contrasts and complexity. Pichler’s not examining immigrants and émigrés in Lafors per se – they’ve been there, ordinary people in the community, working jobs, running businesses. It’s only when the economic stakes are raised that those old tired frictions resurface. Aida is of Iraqi descent, Dana is Turkish; Aida lives with her cleaning-lady Aunt, while Dana’s parents own a bakery. Musse, the city official, has an elderly Sri Lankan mother who has reverted back to speaking only Tamil. Pichler just shows us normal people in normal circumstances working through common problems of money and class, work and family, and being civil neighbors.
There’s an enormous amount of Steadicam photography here, which usually makes me seasick, but Pichler has the talented services of the young, tasteful and efficient Johan Lundborg, and his work is seamless and well-executed. I liked the eclectic mix of soundtrack music, too. It’s maybe ten minutes too long, but I can’t tell you what should have been cut. It’s enormously entertaining, genuinely edgy but with real intelligence underneath. I highly recommend this film as well.
Periscope In The Bathtub 