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Danish director Christoffer Boe takes self-reflexivity perhaps a little too seriously in his heralded movie, which won the Camera d’Or for Best Debut Film at Cannes 2003. It opens with August (Krister Hendricksson), a jaded novelist, describing the fiction to follow in a portentous voiceover reminiscent of Lars von Trier’s Zentropa. One of his characters (or is he a "real" person? only Jorge Luis Borges knows for sure), photographer Alex (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), is riding the metro with his girlfriend, Simone (Maria Bonnevie), when without explanation he slips away to follow Aimee (Bonnevie again), a stunning stranger and, it happens, August’s wife. Throw in a few references to Orpheus and add pixilated spy-satellite imagery used as transitional establishment shots and you have "That Obscure Project of Desire" or "Next Door at Marienbad." The film takes a welcome "Kafka in Wonderland" turn in the middle when Alex finds that his apartment has disappeared and that his acquaintances no longer recognize him, an anarchic element that along with Bonnevie’s haunting performance rescues the film from total humorlessness and contrived pretentiousness. In Danish and Swedish with English subtitles. (90 minutes)