Dagur Kári's 'Voksne Menneske': Grown-up People / Dark Horse

[Sigur Rós]

I just saw Dágur Kári's new danish film 'Voksne Mennesker' which is also in competition at Cannes. I already want to go see it again. I think it's one of the strangest and most fascinating films I have ever seen. The style and script (dialoges) are so unique. The music, humor, actors everything is fantastic. I love this film. Really really love it! Everyone has to see it. If you don't you really miss something. I hope for you all that it gets shown in USA and the rest of Europe.

The plot:
A comedy-drama about the charmingly irresponsible graffiti artist, Daniel, who lives in Copenhagen and earns his living painting declarations of love, on demand, on the walls of the city. He is constantly on the run from parking tickets, overdue bills and the police. Yet he still manages to lead a carefree life. Until he meets and falls in love with the equally irresponsible and charming, Fran.

[Sigur Rós]

TRIBUTE TO THE SIXTIES

The Icelandic filmmaker Dagur Kári is following up his award-winning first feature, "Nói Albinói", with "Dark Horse", an offbeat comedy in black and white.

Francois Truffaut's "Jules & Jim" and his recurring protagonist Antoine Doinel, the two cool characters in Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise", J.D. Salinger's loner Holden Caulfield in "The Catcher in the Rye" and Vernon God Little in DBC Pierre's literary sensation of the same name - literature, music and the movies abound with young male misfits who have to find their own roundabout paths through the outermost periphery of handed-down middle-class convention: romantic, desperate outsiders who eye so-called normal adult human beings with scathing humour and a sad shake of the head. Unexpected love is usually their only available escape hatch. The tradition of the misfit is a rich one.

In "Nói Albinói", his multiple award-winning first feature, the Icelandic filmmaker Dagur Kári very convincingly inscribed himself in this tradition. Nói, the protagonist of Kári's first film is a 17-yearold slacker who likes to stick to himself. He lives in a remote village in Iceland surrounded by all-mighty, wordless nature and his fellow Icelanders who are only slightly more communicative than a glacier. Nor is Nói much of a talker. But whereas the other inhabitants of this sleepy backwater are sluggish in a lot of other ways, too, there is clearly a lot going on inside Nói's head beneath his youthful indolence. He has a decision to make. Should he simply sink into the wordless, local sludge - or does he have what it takes to break out and find another place for himself ? Kári painted this youthful portrait with both humorous detachment and unbreakable loyalty. Nói Albinói took the eye level of its young protagonist to a degree that is rare in film.

DEPARTURE AND CONTINUATION

"Dark Horse", Kári's second feature, marks both a departure and a continuation. Again, the protagonist is a young man with no appreciation for the splendours of social mores. Daniel is a graffiti painter and he is crazy about music. He is far less crazy about such sticky concepts as paying the rent, having a steady income or a fixed residence, filing taxes or paying parking tickets. Only, it is a very different setting this time.

"Nói Albinói" was kept in frozen blue hues defined by winter, nature and isolation; "Dark Horse" is in black and white, big-city black and white, and set in the little big city of Copenhagen where Kári attended Denmark's National Film School - two films shot under widely different circumstances and with great variation in tone. "Dark Horse" is far more of a comedy than "Nói Albinói". Smouldering desperation has been replaced by witty repartee and phlegmatic cool in a light-hearted vein. Even so, there are clear enough links between the two films. Though Daniel and Nói, one Danish, the other Icelandic, are products of widely different circumstances, they are kindred spirits - two misfits created by one temperament but under very different circumstances.

"'Nói Albinói' was made under very tough conditions in the middle of winter, almost at the edge of the world," Kári says. "'Dark Horse' was shot in Copenhagen in the summer. Still, I find it much easier to make a film in Iceland. The Icelandic film industry is so young that it has no regulations or unions. There is a sense that anything is possible and that all problems can be solved in a matter of minutes. It's a very rock 'n' roll attitude. In Denmark, you have constant meetings. I have a hard time seeing what that's good for. Why do you always have to talk about it? That's hard for someone from Iceland to understand. In Denmark, if you want to blink an eye you have to apply for a permit and pay a fee. Also, considering the short working hours, it is next to impossible to make a film in Denmark," Kári says. Nonetheless, he did manage to make Dark Horse and, when pressed, he is willing to admit that, all things considered, Denmark is not particularly rigid. It's probably Iceland that is the exception.

IRREGULAR HOURS AND FAMILY PATTERNS

"I think it's a peculiarly Icelandic thing. Of course, it's understandable that people don't want to work 12 hours a day, but the Icelandic mentality is very different. In Denmark, it's common for people to plan their work around their spare time. That concept doesn't exist in Iceland. People there work all the time. That has some advantages when you are making a film, but of course the consequences can be tough. Families fall apart, people leave each other," Kári says, perhaps providing a hint to why you look in vain for ordinary, functional nuclear families in his films.

Kári's families are irregular and dismantled. In Kári's two films, the sons may be a bit quirky, but they do not hold a candle to the fathers. Nói's father is a drunk and an Elvis fan. Daniel's father is a hardboiled enigma who is always roaring off in a tail-finned gas-guzzler. As long as he can get away with it, Daniel drifts from pillar to post. Nor did Nói take well to commitment and regular hours. Surely, this must pose a dilemma for Kári, if he is even remotely like his protagonists. How do you combine a basically laidback, anarchic attitude with the monomaniacal energy it takes to whip home a film project?

"Yes, it would be great if you could meet the two extremes halfway," Kári says with something of a sigh. Does he resemble his two protagonists? "They are different parts of one imagination, and of course your imaginings are also part of who you are. After all, there are many things you dream of doing. They do not resemble my real life, but they do resemble my fantasy life." Thus Nói was born. "He was a character I invented when I was around 16. I had been collecting ideas without quite knowing what they would turn into, a novel, a comic book or whatever. Then I got accepted to the National Film School in Copenhagen and it seemed really obvious to use the material for my first feature. It was very important for me to shoot my first feature in Iceland. That would also allow me to cap off a process that had been going on for 10 years.

NO PLOTS, PLEASE

"'Dark Horse', I started on a clean slate. Every option was open to me," Kári says. The film was co-written with the Danish screenwriter Rune Schjøtt. Taking a somewhat unusual approach, they practically played the material into shape in a ping-pong process. For several good reasons. Dagur Kári is not crazy about the notion of a traditional plot. He does not want to start by thinking about the story, but prefers to constantly work with little ideas and let them do the work for him.

"I don't get ideas for a story. I get ideas for situations. Then I start collecting. Rune and I took our notebooks and emptied them of ideas. Some we discarded, others we built on. The idea was always to try and have fun with it and not think about the problems or the story until the very end. That it became a comedy I think has a lot to do with the fact that there were two of us. It becomes a game. You want to impress the other person. When you send things back and forth to each other, it has to be fun. You want to make the other person laugh. It started as a bit of a joke. We said we wanted to make a film that looked like Kieslowski directing an episode of Seinfeld. Sitcom crossed with the artsy-fartsy," Kári says, as this Danish-speaking reporter suddenly picks up an Icelandic lilt in the English expression, "artsyfartsy."

The film was supposed to start like a sitcom and gradually quiet down and get more serious in the process. That was another ambition: to switch genres in mid-stream. Seamlessly, almost unnoticeably. "The story, so to speak, grew organically out of material we were having fun with. Characters grow quickly that way. Two situations alone will say a lot about the character involved in them."

THE SHOOTING STAR AND THE TOP MODEL

The lead, Daniel, is played by Jakob Cedergren who was the Danish "Shooting Star" at last winter's Berlin Film Festival. Around him we find a line-up of the most exciting young and youngish names working in Danish film. Cedergren plays Daniel, a graffiti painter who pays the rent by spraying declarations of love on commission. His life runs its haphazard course until the day he falls in love himself and has to debate whether the time has come to take life a little bit more seriously. The girl he falls in love with, Franc, is played by an unusual screen debutante.

Tilly Scott Pedersen is Danish, but has been around the world before taking her first part in a Danish film. Striking out at the tender age of 17 to study photography in New York, she was discovered by the Metropolitan Models agency and went on to work in London, Paris and Milan. Back in New York, she studied for two years with Jackie Bartone (The American Academy of Dramatic Arts) and had bit parts off- Broadway. Now, she is flashing her singular good looks and quirky charisma in a Danish film by an Icelandic director, no less, and in black and white, the coolest colour scheme since Jim Jarmusch did "Stranger Than Paradise".

"It's important for me to create a cinematic universe that is a few steps removed from the actual world, but which still resonates in things we know. Copenhagen is highly recognizable to Danish audiences, but by making it black and white you create a new Copenhagen within Copenhagen. There was another, more pragmatic reason for it, as well. We shot at more than 100 locations. Black and white was an effective ploy to ensure cinematographic cohesion. A third reason was that I wanted to pay homage to the sixties, a time with a highly effervescent film language, offhand and stylish at once. I wanted to express that in a way that, so to say, was nostalgic in the now. Black and white is great for that."

Despite its homage to the sixties, "Dark Horse" is a very contemporary film. This is underscored by the soundtrack, another aspect where Kári is in control. The score is by Kári's own small band, Slowblow, which also did the score for "Nói Albinói". Again, however differently the two films have been handled, there are many aspects of the two films that maintain an inner cohesion. It goes to show you can take the filmmaker out of Iceland, but you cannot take Iceland out of the filmmaker.

BY KIM SKOTTE
May 2005

[Pubrick]

i hav just split Thor's last two posts from the Noi Albinoi thread.

the above article (and various online resources) refers to the film as Dark Horse, but imdb says the international english title is Grown-up People. the Danish to English translation as far as i could figure out online does roughly equal IMDB's title. can anyone clarify what this Dark Horse business is about?

[w/o horse]

Dark Horse is the international title.

Also, Noi was good times, but this movie looks like really good times.