Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Dreaming in television
Nam June Paik's TV installations paint the Guggenheim Museum with the psychedelic colors of the cathode ray.
By Daniel Kunitz
[03/02/00]

Column
The ballad of Luther and Johnny
In the jungles of Southeast Asia, 12-year-old twins lead a band of rebels. My twin sister and I got into trouble a lot, too.
By Sarah Vowell
[03/01/00]

Music
Inside out
Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan talks about his downtown jazz, boho marriage and stately new record.
By Andy Battaglia
[02/29/00]

Music
The pink scare
Slightly neurotic Russian superstar Zemfira is Elvis, the Sex Pistols and Courtney Love rolled into one.
By Michael Zilberman
[02/29/00]

All in la familia!
A week in the life of "La Vida en el Espejo," one of the hottest prime-time telenovelas.
By Andrés Martínez
[02/28/00]

Complete archives for Arts & Entertainment

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Kresten was the first character to seize his imagination. "I know several guys like him from the bureaus I work with when I do commercials," he said. "I like guys like Kresten; they're so restless. They're just out there thinking 'me me me me me.'" Kragh-Jacobsen mentioned that his career-minded father-in-law lost track of a beloved friend and compared that to the human failings of his contemporaries; he decided, "This was a good thing to catch up with -- a guy who thinks so much about himself and says whatever suits him to [benefit his] career. Then suddenly he is one day hooked on this big lie: He admits he has to clean up, go back to where he came from, and stay."

The director wanted his tale of redemption to be a love story. What helped him flesh it out was "finding actors when I had just five lines, so I could write the rest of it to some faces." Anders W. Berthelsen, who plays Kresten, was a popular TV star. Jesper Asholt, who gives Rud hilarious and poignant hand movements that never quite articulate his thoughts, had appeared in student films. And Kragh-Jacobsen had seen the emotionally pristine actress Iben Hjejle both on stage and in a small Danish movie. He thought she had star quality -- "she's not just beautiful and sexy, she has many layers." (She costars with John Cusack in Stephen Frears' forthcoming film of Nick Hornby's novel "High Fidelity.")

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

To throw Kresten's corruption into stark relief, Kragh-Jacobsen portrayed his brother as a developmentally damaged grown-up. "I've always been fascinated by the 'adult child,'" he said. "I have a home in the countryside, where there is a home for people like that 10 kilometers away. They're always standing there, waving. I decided to visit them, and it was funny to be there. There's something unspoiled and still very innocent about them. I decided I would like to portray a person like that someday. It's not a new story, but Jesper and I worked hard at it. Both of us went to some of these homes. And we spent two days with 420 retarded people gathered for a sports weekend.

"One thing we talked a lot about was getting rid of Jesper's intelligence. Very often he came out and I said, 'You are too bright in your eyes'; he had a mantra he was working with. And it took him 15 minutes. [After production was finished] I had a very blurred shot and at the end I brought Jesper back to help me pick it up. He couldn't climb back into Rud. He had the same costume and the same hair, but after two hours I had to say it's not him. That's how much Jesper had been into it."

As for Iben's call girl, Liva, "I can put my hand on my heart and say, I wanted to find something else for Iben to do. There's no doubt that I made a portrait of every man's dream of a whore. But I don't regret that -- I think that's nice! I thought that if I succeeded with the love story, I could convince the audience that she contained many other things besides being a whore. If you see her as a tender woman I have reached my goal. I wanted a character with a secret. And there were no other secrets I could find -- I didn't want her to be running from a husband who was abusing her, or anything like that. So I decided she should be an escort girl, a call girl. I researched, though not as much as I wanted to, because my wife didn't think it was such a good idea. I talked to several of them, and found that they actually became like a family to each other, because they have this job that they can't tell anybody about. They have their problems. They share good and bad things, and I was attracted to that."

The most daring scene occurs when Liva, wanting to punish her manipulative brother and the callous Kresten, briefly drifts back to prostitution. "She's saying, 'I'm a whore, and I'll show them.' That caused the only discussion I had repeatedly with my producer, who is a woman. She said that I would never get the audience's sympathy back for her. And I said I will, because the movie is about forgiveness, and because Kresten is as wrong as Liva is. He's been cheating and lying about everything and she has this métier as a call girl: Why shouldn't she use it? I'm very attracted to these not-very-clean people. Why shouldn't they have a life in movies?

"I wanted to deal with liars -- being a liar is part of being a movie writer-director; you're doing that all the time. Especially in the world of commercials, sometimes to get rid of problems you say things that aren't true. But a lie like Kresten's, that's where you really can get caught, get hooked. 'No I don't have a family': And you have a family! This guy is into money; and a call girl, she makes a lot of money, too. Now, in the movie, they are both getting into a simpler life and finding love. And that's what we're doing with the Dogma films. I thought of that a lot!"

Since it was a Dogma film, finding the right location was critical. Lolland proved to be ideal visually and dramatically. "It's flat in a beautiful way. The look it had -- two-thirds sky and one-third country -- was right for this story. There aren't many people, and I thought it would be fun to be living out in Lolland in camping-wagons with these guys. There was a depression 10 or 15 years ago; farmers could no longer make a living on 10 to 20 acres, so one farmer would buy five other farms. I looked at 21 empty houses." On the day Kragh-Jacobsen chose the one he used in the film, he heard the news that Mifune had died. Mifune in "The Seven Samurai" is as big a liar as Kresten -- he's a peasant masquerading as a samurai. "I decided to give him a last tribute," the director says. "That's why in Danish the film is called 'Mifune's Last Song.'"
salon.com | March 2, 2000

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon