Winner of the Silver Bear at Berlin Film Festival in 2006, Soap has been touring prestigious festivals ever since and experienced several theatrical releases. Why those theatrical releases have been mostly limited or so belated -in France for instance the film has just been released- is probably due to the very Scandinavian side of the film.
What is that ‘Scandinavian’ side? Is it that very same thing that actually played down as outstanding as award-winning features such as Elling by Petter Naess, Songs from the second floor by Roy Andersson, Insomnia by Erik Skjoldbjaerg (for which there even was an American remake!), Lilya 4-Ever by Lukas Moodysson or more recently The Bothersome Man by Jens Lien and even The Direktor by Danish director Lars Von Trier?
Why don’t those films yield as good results as in their home countries? Is it a question of language? (Those films are hardly dubbed and the international audience seems to find it hard to listen to Scandinavian sounds…) A question of climate? (Maybe it’s hard too for the general audience to handle the environment and the light from those Northern regions…) What else? Scandinavian style and culture? (A sick humor, a disconcerting self-deriding tone, as radical as unpredictable formal biases, no clear frontier between good and evil –unlike the US pattern-, which may be disturbing for the audience since there is no possibility to identify to a specific hero). Or simply precisely biases and shortcuts? (Scandinavian cinema = Bergman = Way too intellectual…).
And yet, Scandinavian cinema has never been so dynamic and innovative with emerging promising or established filmmakers such as Bent Hamer, Lukas Moodysson, Dagur Kari or Susanne Bier, and not the only Kaurismaki, Bergman and Von Trier –though the latter keeps renewing his work and stand out to that effect as one of the rare established directors to question and play with cinema as cinema maybe plays with its audience! In THE DIREKTOR for instance, Von Trier emphasizes the radicalism of his intention by producing DVD extras that preserve the derision of the film and by breaking his own status as a filmmaker and the actors’ images –turning his cast into mere victims of cinema machinery embodied in the film by the Automavision process, which frames in an uncertain way the characters (excluding them on and off from the field and deliberately escaping thus from the director’s control !).
Back to Pernille Fischer Christensen’s Soap, the film handles in an original and bold way the topic of transsexuality through the story of Veronica, a woman since always yet waiting for the ultimate surgery that will definitely and definitively remove all doubts to that effect. An introvert and romantic woman, Veronica watches day after day her favourite TV show, a soap opera. Until the day she meets by chance with her new neighbour, Charlotte, who’s just broken up with her boyfriend and moved into the building. Charlotte is a gorgeous extravert and strong-headed woman. And yet she’s far from being satisfied with her life. Something she can not identify is missing… Spiciness? Creativity? Love? All of them? In any case, she is fascinated by Veronica…
More demanding than Transamerica, Soap ventures into both sophisticated and bold formal paths –in the way of a soap opera- and follows realistic, complex and attaching characters, with an unusual, crude, humoristic, cruel, well ‘Scandinavian’ tone! An iced tragedy-comedy to be discovered absolutely !
Françoise Duru