Cinematical.com – Kim Voynar
There’s a renaissance of sorts with going on with Danish filmmaking of late, and Danish director Pernille Fischer Christensen’s En Soap (A Soap) is at the forefront of this year’s entries. The film premiered at the Berlinale, where it took home the second prize jury-awarded Silver Bear and won Best Debut Film to boot. After seeing the film last week at the Seattle International Film Festival, I can see why the film got such accolades in Berlin.
Seldom do I see a film that is so well done there’s nothing I would change about it, but this is the second film at SIFF about which I can say that (the other is Nick Cave’s brilliant Aussie western, The Proposition). A Soap is a splendid example of how a great film can be made on a low budget, simply with great writing, acting and directing. As you might infer from the title, the film is structured to mimick soap operas: a door opens, someone comes in, something happens, someone leaves. Next scene. There are several vignettes like this that move the narrative of the tale along as we observe the lives of two very lonely people: Charlotte (Trine Dyrholm), who just walked out on Kristian (Frank Thiel), her doctor boyfriend of four years, and Veronica (David Dencik), her new downstairs neighbor, who is a pre-op transexual hoping to get approved for her surgery.