Danish Film Festival in Austin

So we watched Reconstruction last night. It had my second favorite Danish actor – Nikolaj Lie Kaas as the main character. It was avant-garde and romantic. Very non-linear narrative, like a dramatic romantic version of Stranger than Fiction.Still. One of the major problems I had actually “loving’ this film was the score. They used the “Adagio for Strings” composition by Samuel Barber that was made famous from Platoon. First off, this song has been used in at least 24 Films or Television shows! Secondly, even it had never been used before, the song is clearly evoking of Big Panoramic images and epic scale. Like Bombs falling on villages or Climbing a mountain while remembering a dead wife in flashback.

I mean it does have an aural subtext that is intimate and personal (which is why it worked so well in Platoon) but its major theme is epic.This film is not epic, it’s quirky and clever but mostly its personal. The music should have followed that line of themes. So that pretty much ruined any chance of me Loving it.Other than that complaint, it was good. It reminded me a lot of Godard, and I really enjoyed how different it was from other Danish films we’ve seen lately. It didn’t follow the Dogme Manifesto but it’s not a Zentropa film – not all Danish films are!! Speaking of which, I am not sure I will love the Zentropa stuff after they were bought by Nordisk. I suppose it was inevitable, but really how could something created by the maniac von Trier end up moving towards commercialist art forms.