The Boy Who Couldn't Swim (2011) "Drengen der ikke kunne svomme" (original title)
Director: Anders Helde
Writer: Anders Helde
Genre: Short movie
Country: Denmark
Language: Danish
Duration: 33 min
Year: 2011
Stars: Jonas Wandschneider, Sebastian Elkrog Sorensen, Christian Damsgaard
Rasmus arrives in Copenhagen determined to find his mother whom he has never met. Having just arrived at Copenhagen Central Station Rasmus is approached by Nicklas who wants Rasmus to help him by keeping a stolen IPod. Rasmus does so and to return the favor Nicklas offers to give Rasmus a ride to his mother’s house. Reluctantly Rasmus accepts the offer and that kicks off a day that holds lots of fun and reveals hidden feelings.
Two young actors have that faces that are were very expressive of their personal sense of unsureness and disconnectedness with the world, yet wishing to demonstrate a bravado and control of their personal circumstances. The opening shots of the film showed the yearning and glistening hope in the eyes of the boy, Rasmus, as he looked out the train window, contrasted with the harsh face of a middle-aged stranger sitting next to him on the train whose face showed the angry lines of a firm acceptance of his place in hard world where dreams won’t come true. One can see in that that youth is not apt to find much of value from people such as those, who are more apt to destroy their spirit than they are to ignite it.
In the train station, the other boy, Niklas, almost by a kind of bodily magnetism instantly connects with Rasmus as someone he can trust to help him by holding a stolen item while he escapes from men who are pursuing him. A while later, Niklas, having escaped from the pursuing men, meets up with Rasmus and while it seems that Rasmus has a vague destination he is heading for that he doesn’t feel like revealing to Niklas, Niklas convinces him that they need to go there together with Rasmus riding in the cart of Rasmus’s bicycle cart. And that really was the true journey, the two of them toward, or with, each other, they who share certain personal circumstances and need.
This action of them traveling together seemed to put them together in their own isolated bubble. Much of the movie was simply their traveling together throughout the city of Copenhagen from one destination to another (which I appreciated seeing, as while I have passed through Copenhagen, I haven’t seen very much of it), but the beauty of the city, the simple shared exuberance of the boys as they felt the wind in their hair and a feeling of their own motive power, and the various expressions on their faces, sometimes wide open, sometimes cautiously masked, tell the true story without a need for words. And what words there were, were pointed and expressive, and throughout those conversations the boys were continually reaching out in yearning for connection, and then drawing back into unsureness, wavering on that balance beam between “yes I need” and “no I don’t”.
The title of the movie, “The Boy Who Couldn’t Swim”, made me think of a wise Jewish saying that I learned about in a psychology book, “A father’s job is to teach his children how to swim.” While at first that seems trivial, you come to realize that “swimming” is metaphorical of leaving the safety of home and venturing out bit by bit into an alien and dangerous world (or an uncaring and exploitative one). The father is not to hang onto his children, but to help them grow up into a secure adulthood. So what of those children who have not been “taught how to swim?” How do they maneuver out in this world without having had a secure center to start out from? Perhaps they can have another chance, by finding helpers along the way, if only they can recognize them and take the risk of connecting with them when they find them.
Source: Reviews by Amos Lassen
(228 votes)
Pretty Boy (1993)
The Danish "Pretty Boy", being made available on DVD for the first time 12 years after it's original release, tells the story of another disillusioned modern teenage youth, this time a 13-year-old male hustler roaming the nocturnal streets of Copenhagen. Supposedly fleeing a dysfunctional home life and spending his nights hoping beds to find a place to stay, Nick (Christian Tadfurp) lives a transient and grimly solitary lifestyle as he tries to survive amidst the cold and unwelcoming world he's entered into.
However, this environment soon gets him involved with an organized gang of adolescent hoodlums and hustlers that frequent Harvig's shop. This nasty Oliver Twist-esquire group make their living by seducing idiosyncratic middle age males with a taste for young blood only to rob them later, taking revenge on the sleazy "solicitors" who won't pay up and selling other stolen items to Harvig. Having brushed with them previously at the sleazy train station where he frequently hangs out, Nick soon moves in with the surrogate brood, led by the ruthless Rene (Danish pop star Benedicte W. Madsen), where their nightly escapades give Nick a taste of the nasty, nihilistic rush he's previously only skimmed upon.
The rest of "Pretty Boy", however, is perpetually marred by the filmmakers complete indecisiveness (or, to be more frank, inattention) to his character's inner qualities and outward plight (not only Nick's bewildering, shape-shifting sexual preferences), as well as seeming awfully confused where to take an already over-wrought script that's ultimately just a packed trip lacking a destination.
Although most of the other actors are given little to do (and their portrayals are pretty much geared only towards sufficiency and nothing more), the only other supposedly pivotal perf is Madsen as the gender-bending Rene, which the movie foolishly tries to pass off the conspicuously feminine star as a cross-dresser who people would actually believe as a boy. Nor do they ever explore if this "practice" is strictly business or a dominant psychological obsession, as it seems to stress nothing about Nick's bizarre sexuality. Although Madsen initially seems slickly confident in a role full of crackling, malevolent potential, Sonder eventually loses interest in her, as Rene becomes another bland plot catalyst by the time she strikes up a romance with Nick, haplessly lacking chemistry with him or the rest of this odd and fatally unfocused misfire.