Movie Review - En Soap (2006) | Rental Movie Guide

Movie Review – En Soap (2006)

Posted on 2007 under International

I love not only American movies (by far my favorites) but films from all around the world as well. For example, I’d really recommend French, German, British, Italian, Iranian, Chinese, Japanese, Israeli, and Polish cinema. And if I were forced to select top-3 non-American films, I’d without any hesitation go with Italian, French and Polish cinema, in that order.

And for years I also tried to watch and love Scandinavian movies and spent many hours with the works of such bona fide masters of the medium as Ingmar Bergman. However, to this day, I somehow could not take a full shine to these introspective films from cold countries. They are usually dark, claustrophobic, slow, depressing, heavy, and stuffed to the gills with sexual angst, guilt and alienation. Watch one these northern beauties on a sunny weekend and then have a nice day, if you can! Really…

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“En Soap” is another downer, this one from Denmark. A perfectly convoluted and screwed-up “art theater” and “indie festival” “ouvre.”

Story in a nutshell: a mid-aged blonde woman who owns a beauty salon (which we never see in the film) separates from her abusive husband and rents an apartment at a lower-middle class neighborhood. It is a dull chunk of “project” but with none of the vice associated with similar projects in the USA and with these gorgeous swinging cherry blossoms in full bloom in the courtyard.

The blonde protagonist Charlotte (played by Trine Dyrholm) meets the pre-op cross dresser “Veronica” (David Dencik) downstairs who turns ugly tricks for special S&M customers> These guys like to be abused, enslaved and pay good money for it too. Veronica’s life is spent within the four walls as he is slowly consumed and choked by his/her demons, fears, self-pity and his father’s rejection.

Slowly and eventually the two neighbors become close if not “friends,” they start to enjoy daily TV soaps together (and hence the title of the flick), and towards the end of the film, they become “almost lovers” but not quite.

Frustrated by her inability “to draw out the man” that she assumes hiding somewhere inside Veronica, Charlotte makes a futile attempt to make nice with her ex and go back home. But she bails out when she realizes she cannot go through the lies and pretense anymore.

But Charlotte cannot have a normal hetero relationship with the cross-dresser either since Veronica finally decides and gets the “governmental approval” needed to go through a full sex-change operation.

Through a very tender last sequence, we realize that Charlotte’s life will somehow continue to be linked to Veronica’s in one form or another although we do not quite know how. And on that final note we are left to project the possibilities into the future.

Miss this dark film and you haven’t missed much. Go watch “Victor/Victoria (1982)” instead.

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