UK Premiere / Features – International

Showing @ Filmhouse 3, Thu 16 June @ 18:10 & Fri 17 June @ 22:05

Nikolaj Arcel / Denmark / 2010 / 91 min / Danish with English subtitles

Mads (Thure Lindhardt) is 34,  a bit young for a mid-life crisis, but he’s having one anyway. Jolted into an awareness of his own mortality, he ditches his job as a TV scriptwriter and his girlfriend of ten years in search of something better, of his version of a perfect reality. After six months of playing the bachelor with a string of one night stands and a whirlwind romance with a girl nearly half his age, it doesn’t take him long to realise what a great thing he had with his ex, who has since moved onwards and upwards.

In typical Scandinavian style, writer-director Nikolaj Arcel’s imagery is quite absent of colour, always with a cold white haze across even the warmest, liveliest of scenes. The furniture is stark and minimal, like an IKEA of the 70s, all of which reflects the absence of love and happiness throughout Mads’ journey. Comic in places, the mood is generally pretty sombre as we witness Mads systematically and recklessly throw everything that’s good about his life into the gutter before desperately trying to recover it. Those of us who have had our hearts broken will recognise the depths of self-pity, of the futile longing to turn the clock back to do things differently, of the agony of realising we messed up big time, all of which has been knowingly captured by Arcel and his co-writers Rasmus Heisterberg and Lars Kaalund. The structure and logic that comes from Mad’s scripts act as a mirroring frame to the film itself, as he tries to lift himself out of his depression using his old reliable script format. Of course life doesn’t usually pan out like a movie and there’s no such thing as a happy ending – such is the case for Mads.

So what exactly is the truth about men? Delusional? Unappreciative? Selfish? Fantasists?  If this film is anything to go by, they’re flawed humans just like the rest of us. And that, dear women, is the simple if sometimes unbelievable truth.