18/05/2010

Hastily labelled “the next Lars von Trier” after the Golden Camera and the Prix Regards Jeune for best first feature went to his Reconstruction at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, Danish filmmaker Christoffer Boe decidedly underwhelmed critics and audiences with his next efforts Allegro [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Offscreen [+see also:
trailer
film profile], compared to the little gem he made 7 years ago.

Perhaps this explains why the lead character of Everything Will Be Fine [+see also:
trailer
film profile], selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, is rather ironically a director and screenwriter obsessed with his own oeuvre and unable to finish his script for a war film. The 36-year-old Boe relishes probing an individual’s mental processes and exploring the inner workings of the human soul; and his new film, starting with the title itself, seems to play on Boe’s status as a promising young talent who has yet to prove his maturity as a filmmaker to the world.

Jens Albinus plays the director, Falk, who is waiting to adopt a foreign child with his wife Helena (Marijiana Jancovic) and is getting ready to shoot his next film. But he keeps on running after he runs over a young Arab (Igor Radosavljevic) who entrusts him with a bag containing photographs and a diary. The young man is an interpreter for the Danish army just back from Camp Viking in Iraq, where he witnessed prisoners being tortured. Falk now possesses proof of his own government’s wartime atrocities and is soon prey to a paranoia which fast leads him to think he’s being watched and threatened by the secret service.

After starting off as a political thriller, Everything Will Be Fine morphs into a melodrama, bending genres with the flashbacks and flash-forwards that are Boe’s trademark. What we get is an “indecision” that is orchestrated as if the auteur behind the camera were the protagonist of the film himself. The colour saturation, another distinctive feature of this director’s style, brilliantly conveys the film’s paranoid atmosphere.

Boe once again devotes special attention to the set design of the indoor scenes (a series of designer homes and postmodern hotel rooms). In fact, the film opens with and ends on a pan shot of architecture models that sum up the film’s settings and the main characters; for certain shots of the real scenes he even uses the photographic technique called tilt-shaft, or miniature faking, in order to suggest that nothing is as it seems.

(Translated from Italian)