European Films

Christoffer Boe's Offscreen - Festival review (contains minor spoilers)

After Allegro, Danish maverick director Christoffer Boe returns to the Venice Days for the second year in a row, this time with the experimental Offscreen. In the film, a director called Christoffer Boe is called upon to create a film using the footage left by actor Nicolas Bro, who has gone missing. In an early scene, Boe hands Bro a small digital camera to realise the actor's plan to make a  "love film" about himself and his wife Lene (played by Lene Maria Christensen). But love soon runs out, and how does one make a love film without love?

"The basic idea was to make a film about a guy who can't let go of his wife," says the director. Boe only later realised that this fit well with his previous works Reconstruction (about the beginning of a relationship) and Allegro (about being in a relationship). His previous films contained thought-out, composed, well-lit and choreographed shots, whereas for Offscreen "we just called up a bar and asked if they would mind Nicholas coming in with a camera, and then go and shoot it". But for the director there "is no difference between doing a Dolly shot in a studio and this," a film-within-a-film for which Nicolas was not only the protagonist but also the cinematographer.  

The lack of artifice is further reduced by the fact that everyone seems to be playing a version of themselves, including Boe and Bro, Lene. Where the film stops being a documentary and strays into fiction is never clear: "I love to explore who controls fiction, who is telling the story, and this is a first person narration from another person than me," the director explained. 

The non-progress on his love film becomes an unhealthy obsessesion for Nicolas, whose humiliating attempts to retrieve his wife are much closer to an act of folly than an act of love. The film's final scenes show in what kind of genre you might end up if you start relying too much on a film to sort out your life. Hint: it is not pretty to look at. 

(this article was first published on venice-days.com and cineuropa.org.)