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Nu, 2003
A Jakob (Mads Mikkelsen) marries Lisa (Elin Klinga), but something between them isn't right. While Lisa gets pregnant and cares for their baby, Jakob begins a relationship with Adam (Mikael Persbrandt), which seems to partly explain the lack of sparks between the married couple.
This is a nearly dialogue-free short, with some really lovely compositions and a stark black-and-white look.
Reading reviews about this film online wasn't all that illuminating, because they mainly seem to be "Mads Mikkelsen touch MY face please!", but I think that the story itself is fairly easy to grasp. While usually the tragedy of a gay person shoehorned into a straight marriage is more to do with that person, here it is Lisa who gets the really rough side of things. The baby seems to stand for either her mental state or the state of their marriage, and either way by the end of the short the babies screams have taken on a metallic/demonic tone.
I think that the opening sequence, in which Jakob touches his wife's face with a mix of affection, apprehension, and confusion, is probably the strongest moment of communicating how alienating it would be to be in a marriage in which things just didn't feel right. While Jakob goes through the motions--the marriage and the sexual consummation of their union---it is without real passion. By the time Jakob finds a relationship that makes sense, it is too late. Him finding his happiness means the emotional abandonment of Lisa (and their baby!).
A solid short with good performances.
(Also, this had no impact on my rating AT ALL, but I was a bit irked to see that the most common plot summary around for this one refers to Lisa has "having something up her sleeve" as if
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Nu, 2003
A Jakob (Mads Mikkelsen) marries Lisa (Elin Klinga), but something between them isn't right. While Lisa gets pregnant and cares for their baby, Jakob begins a relationship with Adam (Mikael Persbrandt), which seems to partly explain the lack of sparks between the married couple.
This is a nearly dialogue-free short, with some really lovely compositions and a stark black-and-white look.
Reading reviews about this film online wasn't all that illuminating, because they mainly seem to be "Mads Mikkelsen touch MY face please!", but I think that the story itself is fairly easy to grasp. While usually the tragedy of a gay person shoehorned into a straight marriage is more to do with that person, here it is Lisa who gets the really rough side of things. The baby seems to stand for either her mental state or the state of their marriage, and either way by the end of the short the babies screams have taken on a metallic/demonic tone.
I think that the opening sequence, in which Jakob touches his wife's face with a mix of affection, apprehension, and confusion, is probably the strongest moment of communicating how alienating it would be to be in a marriage in which things just didn't feel right. While Jakob goes through the motions--the marriage and the sexual consummation of their union---it is without real passion. By the time Jakob finds a relationship that makes sense, it is too late. Him finding his happiness means the emotional abandonment of Lisa (and their baby!).
A solid short with good performances.
(Also, this had no impact on my rating AT ALL, but I was a bit irked to see that the most common plot summary around for this one refers to Lisa has "having something up her sleeve" as if
WARNING: spoilers below
her killing of their child is something done as a trick or a way to punish Jakob, when the sound effects and the way she is filmed clearly show that she's having some sort of breakdown or possibly post-partum depression issues.
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