E-Mail This Article to a Friend RECONSTRUCTION

Danish director Christoffer Boe takes self-reflexivity perhaps a little too seriously in his heralded debut, which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes 2003 for Best First Feature. The film 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 August’s characters (or is he a "real" person? only Jorge Luis Borges knows for sure), a photographer named Alex (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), rides the metro with his girlfriend, Simone (Maria Bonnevie). Without explanation, Alex slips away to follow Aimee (Bonnevie again), a stunning stranger and it happens August’s wife. Throw in a few references to Orpheus and use pixilated, spy-satellite imagery for transitional establishment shots and you have That Obscure Project of Desire or Next Door at Marienbad. Reconstruction takes a welcome Kafka in Wonderland turn in the middle when Alex finds that his apartment has disappeared and all of 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)