| review: Uden for kærligheden (Outside Love) |
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| Written by Boyd van Hoeij | |
| Monday, 31 December 2007 | |
 Though the second feature film from Danish director Daniel Espinosa (the Swedish Babylonsjukan / Babylon’s Disease) might at first seem like the umpteenth modern update of Romeo and Juliet, in reality Uden for kærligheden (Outside Love) tries to grapple with complex issues as a reflection of our complex times. Written by editor Daniel Dencik, who makes his debut as a screenwriter, and with Daniel’s brother David Dencik in the lead, Uden for kærligheden is finally too long to make for compelling viewing throughout. Nevertheless, strong performances and an interesting take on the age-old opposites-attract story should drum up some interest for this title, even if box-office results in Denmark were disappointing.After his tour de force performance as a transsexual neighbour falling in love with a heterosexual woman in En soap (A Soap), Danish Shooting Star David Dencik here plays Shmuli, the widowed father of a five-year-old son and himself the oldest son of a conservative Jewish family in Denmark. Quite unexpectedly, he finds himself falling in love with Amina (Louise Hart), a Muslim shopkeeper from the neighbourhood. It will surprise no one that both families prefer to stress the potential couple's differences rather than see their similarities, though here Espinosa and the Dencik brothers use this nominal conflict only as a springboard for an exploration of life in one of the more difficult neighbourhoods in a Danish city that gets more authentic the further it gets away from the clichés of a zealous Jewish family and its Muslim counterpart. In the context of Espinosa’s Loachian street realism (Ae Fond Kiss comes to mind), discussing the holocaust at breakfast feels both slightly surreal and contrived -- it paints Schmuli's parents (Karen-Lise Mynster and Dick Kaysø) into a corner in terms of character development. What nevertheless makes Uden for kærligheden stand out from countless other Romeo and Juliet scenarios is the fact that it views prejudices about certain groups from the point of view of people on the fringes of those groups. Amina might have a strong opinion about the Arab-Israeli conflict, but her family is Pakistani and thus not directly implicated, while Schmuli likewise comes from a family that might be Jewish but might as well be considered Danish. Schmuli’s conversations with his parents or his naive desire to escape to the United States of Joe DiMaggio are not half as interesting as the time he spents with a Jewish friend of roughly the same age (played the always reliable Nicolas Bro, from Offscreen), exactly because their conversations sound like conversations between friends rather than between fellow Jews that have to present a united front no matter what. Gritty 16mm camerawork adds to the streetwise attitude of the film, while the general tone mostly avoids the head-on collisions so often favoured in Danish dramas -- from the work of Susanne Bier to films such as Annette K. Olesen's 1:1, which also dealt with immigrant friction in Denmark. Though Uden for kærligheden is not as tightly scripted and edited as Babylonsjukan, it still is a worthwhile effort from a director interested in more thoughtful dramas that explore the dark sides of idealism and prejudice. This film was screened as part of the 2007 Mannheim-Heidelberg Film Festival. Browse for DVDs, soundtracks, books and more: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr, amazon.de, dvdGO.es, internetbookshop.it, nl.bol.com, allposters.com. |
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