A note on the final scene from Hr. Boe & Co's Everything Will Be Fine (2010)
PROLOGUE:
The films of the Danish writer/director
Christoffer Boe have, up to this point at least, played with the idea of
fiction as a reflection of reality; where stories are created as an attempt to
make sense of some painful or unspeakable emotional truth, and where the
characters find themselves unsure of their own role as protagonists in a
strange and unfathomable story, which throughout seems to have been designed
for their own benefit and dictated by the whims of an unseen yet omnipotent
force.
In his very first feature-length film, the
acclaimed Reconstruction (2003), the idea of a profound blurring of the line
between fiction and reality found an expression in the parallel stories of a
young couple falling in and out of love, and a middle-aged novelist realising
that his wife is leaving him for a younger man. As the stories develop and
overlap, we begin to suspect that the young couple are not just figures that
appear on the fringes of the writer’s existence, but are the central characters
from a novel currently being written. The writer is telling his own story,
which becomes the story “on-screen”, but the characters he creates are unable
to accept that they are avatars in a world of fiction, and at the mercy of this
unknown and all-powerful “god.”
As ever, reality and fiction become one,
as Boe and his co-writer Mogens Rukov create a feeling of almost dreamlike
abstraction, as both the characters and the audience are left to question the
integrity of this “reality” when presented via the inherent “unreality” of
film, as a medium.
Reconstruction
[Christoffer Boe, 2003]:
In both these films, the “meta” aspect is
fairly direct. Third person narration is used to suggest the perspective of
“the author”, or the storyteller, who creates a distance between the audience
and the work by taking the most painful and tragic elements of these
characters’ lives and turning them into something almost like a storybook or an
old-fashioned fable. We know from just about the very first scene that what we
are watching is an interplay between the real – or “the real” within the
context of the work -and the purely fictitious, and throughout there is an
almost unspoken acknowledgement of a certain manufacturing or manipulation of
events.
If his follow-up film to Allegro was
ultimately a disappointment, it nonetheless spun these particular concerns in
an entirely different and sometimes disturbing new direction. In Offscreen
(2006), Boe’s most difficult and provocative work to date, the director would
further blur the line between reality and fantasy, but in a way that had a far
greater resonance to the world in which we live. Gone was the dazzling ‘scope
photography and the lush wintery colours of both Reconstruction and Allegro
(and with it that sense of poetic melancholy that seemed to evoke the best of
early Godard or late Wong Kar-wai), replaced instead by a deliberately ugly
home video aesthetic – badly lit and often poorly framed – as if attempting to
physically capture the damaged psyche of its central character through the
imperfections of the film.
Offscreen could be described as David
Holzman’s Diary (1967) by way of Gaspar Noé, as the director and his
collaborators use the most familiar tropes of the found-footage genre to trace
the gradual mental deterioration of the actor Nicolas Bro. Here, real life and
violent fiction are once again made uncertain as Bro acts out his own breakdown,
all the while documenting his personal descent on a borrowed handheld camera.
Though the film didn’t work for me, this attempt to strip away the more ornate
or artificial aspects of the films that came before succeeded in giving the
‘meta fiction’ aspect of Boe’s work a genuinely psychological edge. Now the
construction of the film went beyond a simple analysis of the role of the
narrator (or the emotional conflict of a character unable to accept his own
role as an invention in a pre-determined world) to suggest deeper issues, like
the role that the cinema (and movies in general) plays in providing an escape
for characters (real or fictitious), who find in the experience of a film an
element of self-reflection.
This suggestion creates the foundation for
the various existential quandaries raised by the film in question. Everything
Will Be Fine (2010), like Reconstruction, once again spins two parallel stories
that tangle and intersect. The two stories entwine in the standard thriller
format, but throughout there is the subtle suggestion that at least one of
these stories is not what it appears.
THE LAST EMBRACE:
At the end of Boe’s fourth feature-length
film, the protagonists – tortured film director Falk (Jens Albinus) and his
sensitive wife Helena (Marijana Jancovic) – enter a movie theatre. They sit
down to watch a film, embracing, momentarily, as the screen flickers to life.
However, instead of the familiar presentation that we as an audience might
expect when sitting down to see a movie, the screen is instead enveloped by a
cloud of silvery mist. As the couple watch, enthralled by the spectacle
“on-screen”, traces of a confetti-like glitter begin to filter out towards
them, enshrouding the couple, blanketing them as they stare inertly towards the
infinite void of the frame.
Everything Will Be
Fine [Christoffer Boe, 2010]:
The scene is extraordinary for several
reasons. Even without context it provides a moment of “unreality” that stands
out from the rest of the film’s more conventionally cinematic approach.
Hitchcock is an obvious influence on the more predictable genre elements – the
soldier, the conspiracy, the plunge into obsession – but this moment goes
beyond all that; building instead on a third act revelation that changes the
nature of everything we’ve seen, plunging the film (almost) into the realms of
pure fantasy! It doesn’t just stand out against the “reality” of everything
else, it opens the film up, creating new avenues of interpretation, suggesting
the deeper psychological implications faced by these characters, while also
bringing to a close a particular thread that runs throughout these early films,
where everything is in some way related to that experience of the cinema, where
fiction once again becomes a reflection of our reality.
Within this context, the final scene of
the film becomes, in some small way, Boe’s ultimate tribute to the role that
the cinema plays in creating a threshold between the real and the unreal, and
in this sense, suggestive of the various other accepted connotations of
escapism or self-reflection that the cinema might propose. In this scene, this
moment, the characters find peace of mind in an expression of pure cinema;
here, the film, or the experience of it, not only lifts the spirits, it becomes
something that is almost reassuring, like the title, and its not always obvious
affirmation that ‘everything will be fine’, if only for a moment.
