A black fairy tale, melody tinged with gothic horror, that of the Swedish director, set in Denmark at the beginning of the twentieth century, is a film of form (too much form), rather than content. Luckily there’s Trine Dyrholm. The review of Pigen Med Nalen by Federico Gironi.
It doesn’t take long to understand that Pigen Med Nalen it’s a fairy tale. A black, very black fairy tale. For adults, says the director Magnus Von Horn, a Swede who grew up in Poland, shot this film in Denmark. Protagonist of this story, a melody poisoned by a gothic borderline with horror, a young woman named Karoline, who works in a textile factory and believes that her husband died in the Great War, who falls in love with the young owner of the factory, sees her husband return with his face horribly disfigured and covered by a mask, she is driven away from her dream of love by the very wicked Baroness mother of her fearful lover, with whom she was pregnant, and whose child she will deliver to Dagmar, a mysterious and apparently generous woman who takes care of giving poor people’s unwanted children up for adoption . Or so she says.
Based on a true story (not Karoline’s, but Dagmar’s), Pigen Men Nalen It immediately makes two other things clear, in addition to its nature as a gothic fairy tale.
The first is that thanks to a series of fascinating initial optical games, mysterious at first and which we will then understand have a relationship with the face and mask of Peter, Karoline’s husband, Von Horn emphasizes physical deformity and the deformation of reality. Karoline, in fact, is a girl who sees in the world what she dreams of, and in others only what they want her to see. And if her husband is a freak – enough to end up in a circus – but a clearly very good and generous man, under the mask of Dagmar’s goodness lies an even more frightening moral deformity.
The second is that, in his highly studied black and whitein the composition of the shot within the abused 4:3in the explicit references to German expressionism on the one hand, and to the A24 aesthetics of a The Lighthouse on the other, Pigen Med Nalen is a film of form, before content.
At first almost realistic, then as the story progresses increasingly dark and even hallucinated (there is also talk of consumption of morphine and ether, not by chance), Pigen Med Nalen fully brings its soul out of the shadows when, after leaving her baby with her, Karoline returns to Dagmar, becoming a sort of nurse who breastfeeds the newborns who periodically pass through that house. A strong bond forms between the two women, and also with the mysterious Erena, a very blonde little girl who calls Dagmar “mom”.
As Dagmar’s secrets gradually emerge, and as the woman in whom she tried to reflect and transform herself is progressively revealed, Karoline will have to deal with her faults and her morals.
The fact, however, is that Von Horn insists too much. On accumulation, gothic, melodrama. He insists too much on healing – with DOP Michał Dymek – the formal surface, to the point of too often arriving close to an aestheticism as an end in itself, and a little cloying. In doing so, his story ends up being cold and ruthless. Without the strength of the passions and human feelings that pass through it. AND, Ultimately, Pigen Men Nalen really lights up when she plays the force of nature that is Trine Dyrholman extraordinary actress who here gives depth, soul, character and mystery to the figure of Dagmar.
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