[The film takes] some of its cues from the soaps and melodramas the characters watch together and others from a realist tradition of considerable emotional heft.
Soap (2006)
Runtime: 1 hr 44 mins
Synopsis: This Danish film is not a soap opera as its title might suggest, though it comes close in its way. Instead, this is the story of a sad transvestite prostitute named Veronica (David Dencik) who becomes the neighbor of a surly beauty-shop owner named Charlotte (Tryne Dyrholm) who has left her... This Danish film is not a soap opera as its title might suggest, though it comes close in its way. Instead, this is the story of a sad transvestite prostitute named Veronica (David Dencik) who becomes the neighbor of a surly beauty-shop owner named Charlotte (Tryne Dyrholm) who has left her successful physician boyfriend. At first, sensitive, soap-opera-addicted Veronica and abrasive, opinionated Charlotte can't stand each other, but a suicide attempt brings them closer and soon they're drinking, fighting, and bonding, and the question arises as to whether or not they will fall in love; they are also waiting anxiously for the letter that's supposed to arrive with news about Veronica's gender-reassignment surgery. Directed by Pernille Fischer Christensen, the drama mixes realistic dialogue and drab settings with a loose "cliffhanger" fantasy structure that helps offset the emptiness and desperation of these characters' existence. True to the Dogme 95 tenets, the film features little or no soundtrack music, a washed-out color palette, and naturalistic performances. Fans of stark Nordic character dramas and/or transgendered sex character studies like those of Pedro Almodovar will want to give this one a try. SOAP screened at the Berlin Film Festival and is presented with English subtitles. [More]
Genre: Comedies
Starring: Trine Dryholm, David Dencik, Christen Tafdrup, Trine Dyrholm, Frank Theil
Producer: Lars Bredo Rahbek
Composer: Magnus Jarlbo, Sebastian Oberg
Reviews
While I might want to applaud Fischer Christensen for attempting to say something pertinent about gender roles and stereotypes, there is something curiously lacking in the characters.
Director Pernille Fischer Christensen is striving, I suspect, for a quiet seriousness and a respectful approach to transsexualism, but there's a point beyond which quiet seriousness becomes too-staid solemnity.
Fear of Flying never got made into a movie. But imagine a 21st century version transported to Denmark with a transsexual thrown in for added titillation, and you've got the gist of the amusing melodrama Soap.
Another week, another movie about a depressed transsexual hooker.
... the film is an anti-soap opera in the trappings of an old- fashioned sudsfest.
The idea that these characters are willing to fight like cats and dogs, and destroy each other and themselves, to avoid confronting their intense attraction to each other is totally convincing.
En soap never becomes too soapy, though the film does remain a bit mechanical and predictable at times, despite its rare insight in its subject matter.
The movie strands you in two miserable flats with these cliche-ridden characters and a static love story that is as predictable as it is pedestrian.
Christensen joylessly scrubs A Soap clean of sudsy silliness until all that remains is Von Trier-ian starkness.
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