Two people meet on the streets of Copenhagen after a movie screening: Sander and Ida. Sander is a slacker who has had a hard time with his father’s recent death. Ida is an ocean-eyed girl, on the contrary, running away from her living father with all her might, either in a deep depression or experiencing a crisis of faith.
A chance encounter turns into a serious romance, and the heroes decide to hide their love from the world. They actually lock themselves in their apartments, spending their days just in each other’s company. But one day Ida disappears and Sander herself is found by the girl’s father and brother, making her hostage to another apartment.
Ida’s parent (actress Zlatko Buric “Triangle of Sadness”) He puts a video camera in front of Sander and asks him to tell everything about his daughter, otherwise the hero will not go out. Thus begins Sander’s strange journey through the waves of his memory, where reality and fantasy intertwine, like in a dream, which is almost indistinguishable.
“No Copenhagen” is a new script by Eskil Vogt, author of “The World’s Worst Man”. The picture was nominated for an Oscar and launched the international career of its main star, Renata Reinswe. Vogt, who likes family dramas and mystical thrillers best (she wrote Thelma and the Paranormal herself), re-blends these genres to add a dash of tense detectives to her next work.
The main trigger for the story is Ida’s disappearance, but the tape quickly shifts from “where is the girl” to “who was she”. Sander, whose eyes we perceive the story, saw Ida in his own way. His father, whom he has carefully hidden for years, is different. Everyone is sure that he is right but no one seems to know the whole truth. Moreover, Ida made every effort to remain in their memory not as a girl, but as a vision.
Stories about the disappearance of the main character, whose search turns into the revelation of completely different secrets, are as old as the world. Even Hitchcock built all the tension in his classic Lady Disappears on the fact that the main character saw an old woman on the train and disappeared mysteriously soon after. The situation becomes almost absurd when it turns out that no one but the heroine has seen this woman.
Another writer I would like to compare Vogt with is the modern Danish classic, Christoffer Boe. Even 20 years ago, together with Maria Bonnevie released a stunningly beautiful and poetic drama “Reconstruction”. It was a story about two strangers who learn that their lives have changed dramatically after spending a passionate night together. The hero realized that his relatives would no longer recognize him, and there was no apartment. The familiar world of Bonnevie’s heroine had been subjected to a similar falsification.
Infused with Hitchcock’s mystery and Boe’s poetics, Copenhagen Doesn’t exist is like a transformer movie. There is a mosaic form containing fragments of Sander’s memories and an interlocking doll structure: each new turn of the plot leads to another mystery and that to the next. For this reason, sometimes it is very difficult to understand history and the stratification of the present and the past completely surprises the viewer.
It complicates the perception and melodramatic part of the story. The gooey and sketchy scenes with Ida and Sander seem to be played by two incompetent teenagers. You don’t particularly believe in the depth of their relationship or in themselves, which is almost presented as the last love on earth.
The visual component of the movie, which deliberately removes any brightness, is also depressing: the characters’ decision to lock themselves in their lairs is not that hard to understand because it’s so far removed from the Copenhagen image shown on screen. the city of love as possible. In the movie, it’s as gloomy and gray as after the rain – and so cold inside that it’s really unsettling.
For this reason, it is difficult to say whether the audience will love the film, but it is clear that “Copenhagen Does Not Exist” is one of the most extraordinary premieres of the month. The only sad thing is that if you follow the heroes’ urge to escape, you may want to escape the session already somewhere in the middle and not with them.