AFR Morten Hartz Kaplers Denmark 2006
A lack of knowledge can be liberating. If one knew nothing about the death of Princess Diana and who exactly the Queen of England and Tony Blair were, would The Queen be any good? Well acted perhaps but more likely baffling and irrelevant; a storm in a teacup.
With a deliberate swipe at the solemnity of JFK and a thousand other works that preserve the supposed sanctity of our politicians, Morten Hartz Kaplers has created yet another of the most overused staples of modern multimedia projects – the misleading montage of documentary footage. It isn't bad at all but just like JFK it's in a crowded field. An audience lacking knowledge of the Danish political scene will struggle to differentiate actual fact from misleading fiction thereby wrecking the fragile structure the entire film relies upon.
Whereas in the UK, 2006 will be remembered (for better or for worse) as the year of the Peter Morgan style drama reconstruction of political and iconic figures and events culminating in Helen Mirren's BAFTA win for The Queen. Whether Morgan's next, an adaptation of The Damned United, a take on Brian Clough's hectic 44 days as manager of Leeds United in 1974, will burst this trend remains to be seen but we've moved on from simple clips montages showing our leaders in a misleading light. At least for the next few moments. Even internationally films like Italian effort The Caiman, which explored Silvio Berlusconi's career, have started to explode onto the scene. One of the controversial highlights of the 2006 Toronto Film Festival was Death of a President, a fictional documentary about the supposed assassination of US President George W Bush. Isn't it enough already?
Kaplers' take re-imagines a gay love affair between current right wing Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen and a firebrand young left wing anarchist that culminates in Rasmussen's assassination. Casting himself as the firebrand, Kaplers uses a broad range of Danish talking heads to concoct a mangled view. Although catnip to a presumably liberal European film festival jury, AFR is a hard proposition to get excited about to a non-Danish audience, however clever its presentation and delivery. Without much of a background in Danish politics it was the gay content which stuck out in AFR, notably a scene where a man is shown ejaculating as a tanker ship sails by.
For a UK viewer, the most interesting aspect is the comparison between Rasmussen and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Rasmussen, in the version of reality presented here, and Blair are both obsessed with their legacy and both men cause trouble when their actions become at odds with the traditional policies of their respective parties. Blair has aligned himself with the US republican hawks in his foreign policy whilst the fictional Rasmussen attempts to alleviate the African problem despite coming from a right wing background.
The final irony is that AFR might be a masterpiece hinging on a little knowledge that I don't have. Then again it might not and in years to come the string of similar works will be seen out of their current relevance and context and rightly dismissed. Either way, the joke was on me.
