It’s all really rather shockingly unshocking, for so seemingly provocative a setup. Charlotte (Trine Dyrholm) leaves her indifferent boyfriend, moves into her own apartment, and strikes up an unusual friendship with her new neighbor, Veronica, a pre-op transsexual (David Dencik). Both are depressed, confused people, and hardly pleasant to be around, and their tentative relationship, which flirts with the sexual, never approaches the drama the title tries desperately to evoke — Veronica is a fan of the daily TV soap operas, and she, and the movie fan, should probably stick to them if that’s the kind of excitement one is after. Director Pernille Fischer Christensen is striving, I suspect, for a quiet seriousness and a respectful approach to transsexualism, but there’s a point beyond which quiet seriousness becomes too-staid solemnity. Fans of gloomy foreign — very foreign — film may enjoy, but everyone else can give this Danish movie a pass. No extras. [buy at Amazon]
(Technorati tags: A Soap)
