le quattro volte (w&d michelangelo frammartino)

It's a wonderful thing that cinema can do when you come to something in ignorance and leave in awe. Of course it cannot happen all the time, or else we'd never do anything else: it would be the best drug ever invented. (In a way perhaps the moving image, is just that). But when it does there are few things better than sitting in the black box and watching another vision of the world take shape before your very eyes.

Le Quattro Volte, and I almost say this between clenched teeth, is a small miracle of a film. Between clenched teeth because in some ways it might have been made to have been discussed and marvelled at over middle class dinner tables, and in singing its praises I might be seen as a middle class diner, or dining table. It is set in a picturesque village in rural Southern Italy (one of the few thoughts which disrupted my enjoyment of the film was the notion that, as in parts of France or Spain, it would not seem unlikely that swathes of the village might have been or will be bought up by those dining Brits), and it has nothing very threatening about it at all, excepting the odd goat. This is not a film that's presaging or even casting much of a nod at societal upheaval or global catastrophe. If you wanted to you could accuse it of being twee. However, no matter how twee it might be (and shots of a kid goat, stumbling lost through a wood, might be deemed very twee indeed), it is also brilliantly made.

I'm not sure exactly what the four in the title refers to as the film consists of three stories. One recounts the last days of a taciturn, gnarled goatherd. The second recounts the first days of a kid goat. The last recounts the last rites of a tree. All three are ingeniously connected, one story leading into another. All deal with the most profound of issues: birth, death, and what it means to live, as either animal, vegetable or human. Yet the film brings the lightest of touches to all this profundity. There's a barrel load of wit in the way it uses the camera as spy, or voyeur, on the three stories. Not least in a bravura sequence which precedes the goatherd's death, and manages to integrate Roman legionnaires, the passion of Christ, a demented dog and a flock of wayward goats. In the course of which it obliquely touches on the peculiar but vital life of the village itself.

The villagers remain bit part players in this sly documentary. (Is this a drama or a documentary? Both, or neither? This genre bending is another of its achievements.) When a villager turns, conscious of the camera, then tries to get out of the way, the deceit of the camera's anonymity is deliberately ruptured. At the same time, the host of cavorting villagers can be compared to a group of young cavorting goats, who likewise have their games and social structures, which the camera observes. There is a bizarre humanity latent in these goats, who will be born and get lost and ruminate and eventually die, just like we do. The interweaving of human and animal stories does more than any nature documentary ever could to illustrate how we are all mere creatures, with our curious practices, doing our best to get by under the big sky.

If Quattro Volte reminded me of anything it was perhaps some of Calvino's fables. The film shares his wry, ahistorical observation of rural existence and customs perpetrated since the time of the Romans and before. Things that go beyond language (this is a film without dialogue). If there's been any better exploration of what nature means and the way in which we, as humans, are part of it, no more nor less than a goat or a tree, I have yet to see it. Frammartino's film seems to have appeared out of nowhere like a natural phenomenon itself, laden with a wry wisdom and a pantheistic intelligence.

the diving pool [yoko ogawa]

The Diving Pool is the second of Ogawa's books I've read in quick succession. This is a collection of three novelas. All three are told from the point of view of a female voice, each one on the point of alienation from her society. In The Diving Pool, a young woman lives with her religious parents who act as foster parents to a bunch of children; inspiring in the narrator complex passions of both lust and a muted sadism as she guiltlessly terrorises her younger foster sister. In Pregnancy Diary, the narrator is herself subjected to her pregnant sister's self-indulgent whims; in the final part a woman who is putting off moving to Sweden to join her husband who has a job there finds herself drawn into the menacing world of a nearly limbless caretaker.

There is more to Ogawa's writing than their featherweight narratives. She is what they might call a consummate stylist. There's that pleasure to be gleaned from reading her work of knowing that every sentence has been worked on, but not in an abrasive, ponderous manner. Rather they have been honed and polished, the rough wooden edges of words rendered now as smooth, yet unexpected, as a mirror. Ogawa succeeds in making the physical tangible: food has a curious presence in her prose, it's something alluring but also potentially revolting. Nature is Herzogian: as liable to sting as it is to caress. The depiction of the caretaker who has no arms and only one leg would appear to be something out of a horror movie, and the story feels as though it belongs to that genre, but the careful, cruel-comic descriptions of his method of making tea or opening a door gives the piece another dimension: maybe this man in not so much a figure from a horror story, more a self-sufficient hero? Ogawa's naive narrator opens up this space and the story is defined not just by what it tells, but also by what it might become; the writer playing with the reader's expectations in a delicate game of literary charades.

The interesting thing is that it's the featherweight nature of the narrative that allows the writing to get away with this level of suppressed potential: she leaves her audience wanting to know more. And we are happy to be teased like this on this scale; it never reaches the point of becoming grating. What we don't know is as important as what we're told. The unwritten text perfectly complementing the written text.

fire in babylon (d stevan riley)

The Summer of 1976 was hot. I was ten years old. My family lived in Northwood. I lived there for the three months when I wasn't at boarding school. There was a large garden with a small wooded area at the back. An ample lawn, with flowerbeds on either side. At the bottom of the garden, in front of the house, there was a rosebed. The garden sloped downwards. At certain points in our lives, times when there was a lot of rain, my father would dig channels across the lawn. I presume this was to channel the rainwater away from running down towards the house, but I can't be sure. The sitting room had French windows which opened out onto the garden.

I spent a lot of that Summer playing cricket. I imagine I played mostly with my friend Nick and my oldest sister. The ball would get lost in the flowerbed on a regular basis. The great fear was that it would be hit down the garden and break a window, something which happened at least once. Days were long and hot. In between bouts of playing cricket, we'd go inside and watch it on the television. The old men of England were being terrorised by the West Indians. This is a key part of the film, Fire in Babylon, which tells the story of the rise of the West Indian cricket team in the seventies. The film accentuates to a certain extent the racial overtones of the cricketing conflict between the West Indians and an English team lead by a South African. However, from a child's perspective the issue of race was non-existent. The only thing that was clear was that the West Indians had fiercer bowlers who were too much for the likes of Close and Edrich, men who looked like the most boring of school teachers.

The film made me think about what a peculiar but enrichening slant a following of cricket generates in a youngster. Cricket is a global game, albeit one played by only about ten countries at the highest levels. India, Pakistan, the West Indies: as a youngster I never saw these places in terms of race; merely in terms of cricketing prowess. It's interesting to note that several of the cricketers who feature in this film have expressed reservations about the way in which their comments have been used: the issue of race might have been bubbling under but it was not the priority the film suggests.

All the same, Fire In Babylon looks like belonging to a series of films which seek to elevate sport, placing it within its socio-political context. (The soon to be released Senna will be another). Given the enormous industry that modern sport has become, this seems like both a canny and a justifiable approach. Sport can play a part in the collective consciousness in a way in which art can only look on in jealousy. Art can reclaim its role by seeking to contextualise those moments or feats which are extolled in the day only to be forgotten. Apparently when several of the current West Indian team saw the film, (a team that has reverted to being "calypso cricketers", a tag which Clive Lloyd's team hoped to leave behind forever), they had no idea of the full history of the West Indian team.

Sport is part of the lives of so many of us. On one level it's just commercialised froth; on another its part of the warp and woof of the world we inhabit.

the tunnel [ernesto sabato]

Snr Sabato died recently. His is a name, like Bioy Cesares or Saer, that seems to live in the shadow of Borges. Consequently it was interesting to note that The Tunnel, originally published in Sur magazine, was championed by Camus and presumably was reasonably well known in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.

The book has some of the playful internal machinations of a Borges story. It describes an artist's obsessive and ultimately catastrophic love for a woman whom he spies looking at one of his paintings in a way that leads him to believe she alone has grasped its significance, and hence the significance of his art and his self. Intriguingly, it's not the whole picture that Maria is looking at: it's 'a remote scene framed in a tiny window' in a corner of the picture's canvas. What does she see though this window? On the one hand she sees a vista of the sea, but on the other the artist decides she's seeing into his soul. Sabato's text is delightfully cryptic. Maria and the artist begin an affair, one which is plagued by his jealousy, but details remain sketchy and the 'truth' of her position is never revealed.

This deconstructed, playful approach to narrative, taking Kafka or Dostoyevsky's unreliable narrators a stage further, might be seen as pure modernism, in the vein of Borges's mindgames and Calvino's fractured narratives. But there are two aspects to the book which help to shift it onto another, less cerebral plane. Firstly, it is extremely funny. Castel, the book's anti-hero, has a raw, sardonic sense of humour. The author indulges his frequent asides as he muses on the role of the critic, for example, with scathing vindictiveness. His humour reflects his intelligence as an outsider and it's not hard to see how this voice seduced the likes of Camus.

Secondly, the book deals as tellingly with the subject of love and its lunacy as almost anything you could come across. Castel shifts from anxious passion to deluded paranoia. The way in which the book traces the stages of his ferocious and ultimately misguided love for Maria is masterly. It's not hard for love to become a disease rather than a life-force: the lover's unrealised obsession has more to do with themself, the subject, than the other, the object, even when the lover has convinced him or herself that the other is the one calling the shots. Sabato's occasionally incoherent narrative helps to illustrate the perils of the delusions of love, a world where clouds can look like bears, and the temptation (or dramatic need) to interpret information supersedes any rational appraisal of what's actually occuring. This way, Sabato, seems to suggest, madness lies, no matter how brilliant the lover might be (and perhaps the more brilliant they consider themslves, the more dangerous they become.)

With its humour and meditation on love, The Tunnel comes across as a brief, understated masterpiece. Whilst short, Sabato's text acts as a fascinating counterpart to Borges: the work of someone who shares the maestro's intellectual talents, but seeks to locate these within a more tragic, humane literary context.

i am the wind (w fosse, d chereau)

This review might be subtitled:

Starkness & Stagecraft

Starkness is for Fosse's enigmatic, idiot-savant text. Two unnamed men talk about how terrible the world is, and then go out to sea on a boat. Where they discover the world is not so terrible, but nevertheless suicide has its attractions. This is the second Fosse text I've come across. He is a beguiling writer, if only because you can't quite believe that anyone can get away with dialogue that seems so devoid of subtext. People say exactly what they think. Or do they? It's intriguing to see in this well-acted production that whenever the actors allow a note of humour to enter into their apparently po-faced exchanges, the drama shifts to another, more playful level. It felt as though there were more laughs latent in this piece than the production realised. Tom Brooke, one of the two actors, captured this cheeky ambivalence beautifully. In his mouth every statement became a potential question, and any suggestion of hyperbole or melodrama was undercut by the character's sense of self-awareness. The comparisons with Beckett are there to be made; and like Beckett, Fosse seems to benefit from not being drowned in seriousness.

Drowning being a strong possibility as a result of Chereau's aqueous stagecraft. As you walk in, the large open stage is turned into a puddle. Out of which later will emerge a boat, which could sink at any time. The moment the boat surges out of the deep is arresting, and the swaying, eddying boat which appears complements the meandering dialogue of the piece's middle section. Chereau and his designer's mechanics might have seemed out of keeping with the simplicity of the play, but in the event they work. The play requires a boat on the sea and Chereau delivers this, nothing more nor less. The lights bouncing off the water and water refracting off the theatre walls help lend an ethereal beauty to the space. This is high-tech simplicity, and in its paradoxical way the stagecraft is stunningly effective.

There remains the feeling that this is a brittle piece, one which requires the most delicate of touches to pull off. There are moments when it teetered on the brink of folding in on itself in a miasma of forced poeticism. However, the production skirted the isle of indulgence and came out the other side, into the wide open waters of spectacle and a theatre steeped in the physicality of things.

hotel iris [yoko ogawa]

Ogawa's short novel is set in a Japanese coastal resort town. Which coast it is set on I don't know, but the notion that all those fictional characters who participate in the novel, and the fictional town itself, might no longer exist, adds piquancy to a slight but finely written story of depravity and delinquency. One of the comments in the blurb, by Hilary Mantel, says - "I admire any writer who dares to work on this uneasy territory". This territory being the sexuality of a seventeen year old girl who enjoys, that being the operative word, a fraught and to-most-people's eyes abusive sexual relationship with a man three times her age.

There's much here that seems to resonate with foreign notions of the Japanese psyche. The use of sex as both a complex outlet for power games and a means to excavate the subject's confused interior landscape. Mari, the protagonist, desires the humiliation that her lover, the Russian translator subjects her to. Here is the pertinence of Mantel's comment. It is the kind of book which it might be said could only be published by a female writer, in this day and age. If a man were to suggest that Mari wanted this 'abusive' relationship, exploring it from her point of view, it is hard to think he would be taken seriously and would in all likelihood be read as exploitative. However, in Ogawa's hands, the story is strangely convincing. Mari is never a victim: she remains a level-headed appraiser of her situation, no matter how dangerous. We are in similar territory to the recent film of Norwegian Wood: just because you're going through something difficult and complex doesn't make for an inevitably tragic narrative. The resilience of youth enables people seeking experience to embrace strangeness; a strangeness which society, (in Hotel Iris denoted by the townspeople and Mari's family), cannot contemplate as anything but alien and reprehensible.

The book's effectiveness is not founded on its more salacious material, but on the way it gets under its protagonist's skin. The whole world is coming alive for Mari, and the translator is but one part of that world. At times the book's town feels reminiscent of Prout's Normandy seaside holiday resort; the seaside, with its unique rhythms, is a great place to grow up, to realise the possibilities of the adult world. Ogawa's prose offers precise descriptions and is unafraid of surreal detail (a plague of fishes, a lunch of multi-coloured soups). Hotel Iris is a book that succeeds in exploring the most provocative of worlds without really being provocative at all. By reducing the salacious to the mundane, she seems to suggest that we shouldn't over-emphasise deviance or sexuality; normality abounds in even the most rarified of situations.

how i ended this summer (w&d aleksei popogrebsky)

Two men, stuck on an island in the Arctic Ocean off the North Coast of Russia. It's a recipe for trouble, evidently. Especially when we learn early on that there's an 'isotope' on the island. What is an isotope, you might be asking? Well, it's a biggish radioactive device that looks like a half-submerged bomb. It gives off a satisfyingly dramatic racket when a Geiger counter is placed in its vicinity. It can also keep you warm if you find yourself stuck out in the wilds. Dangerously warm.

Popogrebsky's film begins as a lyrical meditation on life in a cold climate, before morphing into a kind of pointless existential psycho-thriller. In post-Soviet Russia the hard-bitten Sergei finds himself foisted with the young studenty type called Pavel, who drifts around the island listening to his Yo La Tengo-style music and getting a hit from the stunning scenery. Things start to go pear shaped when Sergei goes fishing and Pavel receives the message from the radio that Sergei's family have been in 'an accident'. How he reacts to receiving this message determines their fate. In a sense this is The Dumb Waiter with a polar bear thrown in for the video games generation. (Pavel plays a rather neat shoot-em-up video game with a distressed mural of Marx and Lenin in the background.) The narrative becomes reductive, but then there seems to be limited scope for its development. It's not as though Sergei and Pavel are going to become lovers in the Arctic circle, although that might have introduced a more dangerous twist than the way the story actually unfolds.

The unacknowledged character in the film is the landscape itself, which is ably captured by Pavel Kostomarov, the DOP. There are several effective time-lapse sequences and the polar bear moment works well. However, in spite of all the things that work, the whole project feels a little too contrived and a little too abstract. It maintains a certain discipline, never succumbing to melodrama (in the style of Scorcese's latest, for example). But all the same, it feels a bit cold. Maybe if we'd learnt what an isotope actually does, or why this island has been used as a base through so much of Russia's history, we might have cared a bit more about what Pavel and Sergei get up to in their mannish games. But the script adopts the clean slate approach: the island holds no ghosts, just a relentless capacity for driving its inhabitants radioactive ga-ga.

shadow of the silk road [colin thubron]

Thubron's book is a curious journey. It's been several weeks in the reading. Crossing Asia from China to the Mediterranean. Following one strand of the Silk Road in a ramshackle, Westerly course through 300 plus tightly knit pages, full of dense, frequently poetic prose.

Anyone who's ever embarked on any kind of a journey knows that as well as the discoveries and the sights, there are also the longeurs and those moments where you wonder what the hell you're doing. Whilst Thubron obviously had more of a reason than some for his journey - he was on the way to writing another best-selling book - his account includes plenty of those longeurs and seemingly endless bus journeys.

The journey begins in China and, whilst still in possession of his full energy, this opening is perhaps the most engaging part of the book. Thubron gets to grips with the changing nature of China, retracing steps he's taken before. The fact he knew this land twenty years ago is to the book's benefit: the full extent of China's transformation in that time is ably conveyed. Subsequently, he continues to seek these parallels, looking at the way a place has evolved or declined. However, the route feels so haphazard that, as it unfolds, places bleed into one another. The Stans become something of a blur, and the final stint through Iran and Turkey is a breathless dash for the coast. Again, any traveller knows that there's a slight sense of diminishing returns the nearer you got to the journey's finish: you just want to get there, and the reaching of the end starts to become more important than the encounters along the way, but given that this is an account of the Silk Road itself, it seems as though the writer's weariness is in danger of short-changing the well-trodden path.

In part this is because the reader realises as the writer progresses that there is no real narrative at work here. This is travelling as a mass of observation. Some of it well done, some less so. When Thubron runs into 'ordinary' people, he describes them well. But too often the prose teeters on the brink of a heightened poeticism that runs the risk of seeming repetitive. (I lost count of the number of times he used the word 'faience' and I still have no idea what it means.) But what's going on beneath the surface? Why is the writer even embarking on this trip, unless he's just been commissioned? He seems to have no real stake in the journey, he's just a travelling notebook and pair of eyes. There's no real goal and no real story. Bizarrely, a note at the beginning of the book alerts the reader to the fact that the journey was interrupted for a year in the middle, due to the conflict in Afghanistan. But the book bumps along without reference to this; as though it has never happened. This acknowledged deception only provokes curiosity as to all the other unacknowledged deceptions.

Which is not to criticise the writer for these; the process of documenting a journey has to be a selective one. Just to suggest that his account might have had more purchase and been more satisfying if the writer had let us in behind the veil of his poeticisms a little more. Alluded not just to the journey of history, or silk, but also of the man himself.

la casa muda (d. gustavo hernandez, w. oscar estevez)

Once again, a Uruguayan film on release in London. A Uruguayan film, no mas, starring Jerry, from Harold Pinter's Betrayal. Looking haggard and decadent and far too old to play Jerry, which Snr Alonso probably is. But his abilities as an actor helped him to overcome this issue on stage. And, let's be honest, his abilities as an actor aren't really tested here. Nor are the abilities of any of the other actors, of which there are approximately two. This film isn't about the acting. It's not about much really, at a slight 74 minutes. So, what you may ask, are it, and Jerry, doing here, in London town?

Casa Muda is a genre piece, made in a country that's making perhaps half a dozen films a year now. Casa Muda, a horror made with three actors, a house, a digital camera and a well-conceived sound design, would be among the cheapest of them. But somehow it's ended up getting a world wide distribution deal and selling itself for the already-in-production Hollywood remake. It's not the scariest horror movie ever made, it's not the goriest, but it might be one of the most intelligent.

The piece contains two key conceits. Firstly that it's filmed in a single take, apart from the significant coda. Whether this is true or not - the man on my right said there were lots of cuts and he found them distracting - doesn't matter too much. This is a selling point, and it's well enough done for it to have worked. The effect of this seemingly endless take is to create a piece of cinema that feels as much like a piece of classical music as a film. Hence the significance of the sound design. It has its longeurs - the opening is veering on the dull - it builds towards a finale, and within its progress it has sudden, violent crescendos. If you go with it, it's kind of hypnotic, and uses cinema in a shrewd, non-linguistic manner. The extended, real-time take heightens all of this and not only works on an aesthetic level, it's also a great selling point.

The second conceit is, to a certain extent, revealed by the title. A more precise translation than the working one of "The Silent House' would have been 'The Dumb House'. You can see why the distributors didn't go for that. However, the point about a dumb house is that it doesn't speak. Yet, this is a house that speaks all the time - it clanks and groans and makes scary noises. The title therefore gives away the twist, which isn't worth disclosing here. On one level its a ridiculous twist, as the Uruguayan paper, La Diaria, observed. On the other, it is a functioning twist. It seems to me the writers of the film were smart enough to know that in order to make something distinctive, they needed to come up with an effective functioning twist and they did so. The twist is more important than the viability of the twist. (Even if Bradshaw in The Guardian appeared beguiled by it.) Judged on the level of a horror film it may not be the greatest twist of all time, but it doesn't have to be. After all, it is just a horror movie. Or at least it will just be marketed as such. And this is key to the film's capacity for success. Which, on it's own terms, a little no-budget film made in the backwoods of San Jose, it has undoubtedly been.

Looking at Casa Muda from a perspective of Uruguayan cinema, I'd say, in spite of the fact it's not my cup of tea, that it marks an advance in an emerging industry. Anyone will tell you that the hardest nut to crack is genre. The way in which the film plays up to its limitations, doesn't try to be anything more than the canny piece of filmmaking it is, seems, again, intelligent. Its very simplicity will allow people to impose readings on it in years to come it doesn't seem to be seeking. It's also an object lesson in how to approach the David and Goliath world of the film business. Until you reach the top, your film is always going to be struggling to compete with the production values of films with bigger budgets and bigger stars. (Bigger than Snr Alonso, you might be saying, but yes, sadly, this too is true.) Given this, you can either become an auteur, and a great deal of developing world cinema is auteur lead, and all the richer for it; or you can take the industry on at its own game using the one tool money cannot buy - your intelligence. Hernandez and Estevez demonstrate plenty of this. Not so much in the quality of their product, more in the quality of their intercession with the industry, an intercession which would seem to have paid off handsomely.

Even if Gustavo only earned about $1000 for his grisly work. Nevertheless, the closing credits perhaps made it all worthwhile, no matter how meagre the fee.

armadillo (d. janus metz pedersen)

It's interesting to learn that Metz's film has attracted criticism on the basis that it's too aesthetic. This, it has been noted, is a war documentary that looks like a feature film. The cinematography, the use of music and editing, all serve to heighten the viewer's experience. This attention to technical detail also raises the viewer's awareness of the silent hands at work behind the camera. There appears to be something of a paradox here, because, in spite of the fact they, (at the very least the director and Lars Skree, the cinematographer) are present at all times, in the midst of fire-fights and porn-watching sessions, this is not the kind of doc where the filmmakers become characters within their own movie. Metz and Skree try to absent themselves as far as possible and let the soldiers tell their own story.

Something which can't ever, quite, be done. Firstly, some of the conversations between the Helmand based soldiers, where they talk about what they think of the war they're waging, feel staged and even awkward. Secondly, the film includes several 'debriefings' including one key scene where a soldier appears to boast about his clinical execution of four Taliban, killed in a ditch during a firefight the viewer has already witnessed. Did the presence of the cameras, no matter how used the soldiers might be to them, have some kind of an impact? Were Rasmus and the others starting to take on roles within the as-yet uncompleted film? I don't think it's to the film's detriment that it raises questions about what the impact of having a camera trained on you as you go through meltdown in Afghanistan might be, but this issue does skew the notion of capturing 'reality'. Reality with a camera is not the same as reality without one. Not yet, anyhow.

As mentioned, Armadillo has been criticised as being dishonest. However, in some ways this means that when it does capture moments which feel inherently, indubitably 'truthful', these are all the more powerful. Such as when the bug-eyed wounded soldier sits by the side of a ditch, in a state of delayed terror, traces of which still seem present in his demeanour when the company visit him in the medical camp a few days later. Or, tellingly, the attitudes of the Afghans themselves. Their candour seems at odds with that of the Danes: they say it like it is. "You should go home. The Taliban are going to kill you all." Or: "My wife and child are dead." They don't look at the camera, which presumably, from their point of view, is wielded by another of the robocop aliens who have descended on their land and keep requesting them to put their lives on the line and co-operate. Armadillo's capturing of the problematic dynamic between the occupying forces of 'the West' and the locals themselves, often glimpsed as figures fleeing the latest skirmish to affect their village, is as potent as anything the film tells us about Danish army life.

The film's aesthetics do raise issues and imply a contradiction between the filmmakers desire to deliver a portrayal of the truth of war and their intention to create a well-crafted film. All the same, the very act of capturing war is perhaps, for now, an endeavour beyond the reach of filmmakers. At some point, an inherent dishonesty creeps in. It may be that videos filmed by soldiers on their mobile phones in Iraq or Libya etc are a truer account, but these tell only the most fractured of narratives, they confuse as much as they enlighten. The sequence when the Danes are attacked and fight back, provoking the potential human rights abuse, is baffling, as war must be: who's fighting whom? Are we shooting in the right direction? What the fuck is going on?

My take on the way Metz has gone about this is that he has recognised this inherent dishonesty in the bid to capture war on film, and has therefore embraced it. The very last scene shows the tough Rasmus, back in Denmark, in the shower in his home. This scene is clearly and unambiguously staged. As though the filmmakers are acknowledging the artifice behind their art. Whilst stating, as we have seen to be true, that this doesn't mean that the things that we have witnessed did not occur. Nor that a price has been paid which we, the viewer, even after watching the film, still cannot fathom.