I am the Artistic Director at Carbon Arc Cinema, part of a group of programmers who choose the films we screen. This weekend we’re screening Rose, a Danish film set in France, on Friday, and an encore screening of Fallen Leaves on Saturday.
Written and Directed by Niels Arden Oplev | 106 min | Carbon Arc Cinema
This earnest Danish drama includes a touch of the Dogme 95 DNA in its construction in a couple of ways: It features Peter Gantzler, who also was part of the ensemble of Italian For Beginners, one of the first Dogme pictures, and in some scenes it may make you cringe with recognition of people’s bigotry and fear. Those low-budget classics were always good at that.
Rose is about Inger (Sofie Gråbøl, best known outside Denmark for her work in The Killing), a woman living with schizophrenia, who joins her sister and brother-in-law Ellen and Vagn (Lene Maria Christensen and Anders W. Berthelsen) on a bus tour to Paris in the late 1990s. The tension here isn’t so much within the family — Ellen and Vagn are patient and kind with Inger, for the most part — it’s between Inger and everyone else around her. She’s unpredictable, occasionally even a danger to herself, and makes a few of the people on the tour uncomfortable, especially the buttoned-down Andreas (Søren Malling, a veteran of the excellent political series, Borgen). But his tween son, Christian (Luca Reichardt Ben Coker), takes a liking to Inger. She’s painfully honest with him about her experience and he likes that. As they tour around Paris, a friendship forms, and we learn more about Inger’s past in the city.
That’s the thing Rose does best — it upends preconceptions we might have about people with schizophrenia. Inger is a complex character, a lot more than just her illness, and Malling is terrific in the part. Before Inger got sick she had a full life, and she’s still got a delightful cunning streak. It turns out she’s on a mission, which conflicts with Ellen’s mission — to protect Inger — and Vagn’s mission, which has to do with Princess Diana. Character flaws are writ large but never feel less than honest.
Writer-director Oplev, probably best known for having directed the Swedish version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, apparently based this story on the relationship between two of his sisters, one who lives with schizophrenia and the other who is her caregiver. Rose doesn’t rewrite the template for movies where a lead character struggles with mental illness, but it does offer a fresh perspective. It’s also an unabashed crowdpleaser, and will work hard to pull on your heartstrings.
