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Reviews
Choi voi (2009)
Moody and melancholic
The muted color palette, the shadowy interiors that envelop the characters, the faded French architecture and the flooding rain are suitable metaphors for yearning, love unconsummated and love abused in this Vietnamese exploration of relationships.
The beautiful Duyen marries the infantile cab driver and mother's boy Hai. When he drinks himself into a catatonic state at the wedding celebration while his bride waits expectantly upstairs the portents for a happy marriage are ominous. Cam, Duyen's friend, is secretly in love with her, and bitter about her friend's marriage, arranges an encounter with the Lothario Tho. The shock she experiences when the man literally pounces on her turns to fascination after the relationship with Hai sours. She succumbs to Tho's advances but her sexual awakening brings only uncertainty in a life she once assessed as uncomplicated and pure.
Adrift is a quiet, understated film that subtly leads the viewer into a world of dampened expectations and lives unfulfilled.
Bron/Broen (2011)
Scandinavian Moodiness
A grisly murder on the bridge spanning Sweden and Denmark brings together two odd couple detectives. The Swedish policewoman is brilliant and driven but blind to social niceties whilst the Danish cop is gruffly likable and old school in his policing methods. The murderer employs improbably convoluted means to apparently bring attention to social inequity.
This is underscored by locations where the privileged are seen in their smart architect designed homes and the homeless surviving in plastic shelters on bleak waste grounds. The downbeat mood is appropriately filmed in a monotone low key palette and pauses between the action are filled with poetic long shots of the cities of Malmo and Copenhagen beneath lowering skies.
After viewing episode three there is an unavoidable feeling that this series is set in the tradition of Scandinavian crime pioneered by the writing team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo and furthered in more recent times by the Wallander and Unit one television series. A more understated approach would have been preferable to the drama that at times suffers from hyperbole but I am looking forward to the coming episodes nonetheless.