Review of The Girl with the Needle
Many of the films competing in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival were predicted to receive nominations in the "Best Foreign Film" category. However, Payal Kapadia's "All That We Imagine as Light" was overlooked by the film academy, while the controversial Jacques Audiard with "Emilia Perez" and the much more deserving nominee Magnus von Horn and his "The Girl with the Needle" made it to the shortlist. However, the premiere of this film, like the screenings of many other films included in the festival program about the reproductive (im)health of women, whether it be Audrey Diwan's "The Event" or Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," was not without a storm of impressions. The frankness, ordinariness, or anatomy is irritating. There is an abundance of everything in фон Horn's film.
World War I has passed its halfway point, which Karolina (Victoria Carmen Sonne) can only guess: a neat seamstress at a sewing factory in Copenhagen believes that her impoverished condition can be patched up by an unequal marriage to the owner of a weaving industry. The polite Jorgen (Joachim Fjelstrup) hesitantly talks about a future together but confidently lifts the hem of her dress. When the pregnancy is difficult to hide, the baroness mother (Benedikte Hansen) enters the marriage dialogue, closing the doors to both the family and the factory for Karolina. The needle that "marries" the coat to the pocket is replaced by a long needle that tears the flesh: there is only one way out - an abortion in unsanitary conditions. Karolina, bleeding on the tiles of a public bath, is picked up by a polite lady Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm). The abortion procedure is not completed, and the new acquaintance promises to find a home for the unborn child - under the roof of a good family that has financial resources and medical complications with conception.
Magnus von Horn seems to dress the viewer in a spacesuit and plunges them to the very bottom of the ocean, although the water on the screen is more often in buckets and basins than in open water bodies (except for the stormy current of the sewer). The imaginary armor is the historical distance and black and white color - we observe the picture from a seemingly safe distance, guaranteeing that there are no risks of drowning. At the same time, the laws of bizarre metaphysics cannot be bypassed: the deeper we go, the more pressure on the chest, and nothing will stop the goosebumps on the skin and the pulsation of the sound design in the ears. The camera closely follows the fearless Victoria Carmen Son - it sometimes seems that we see the back of the actress's head almost more often than her empty eyes and hands distorted by need. Denmark maintained neutrality during the war, but non-interference did not save it from unemployment and grief on the fronts and within the city - her husband, whom Karolina considered dead, will return scarred and literally disfigured, but even the veteran will find a place only in the circus. And Karolina will not be taken to the big top.
Returning to the oceanic depths, where impenetrable darkness reigns: "The Girl with the Needle" in the hands of a skilled marketer can turn into a retro true crime that grew on the soil of German Expressionist cinema: classics fall in love with fiction. The script is based on a real story, "embellished" with artistic assumptions, but allow yourself to correlate the facts only after watching. фон Horn is much more concerned with the climate and texture that gave rise to the crime than the anatomy of the crime: drafts of rented rooms, empty buckets in the corners, soil and dust on bags of potatoes, cries of newborn children who have nothing to feed. Poverty is a true friend of hopelessness, which Karolina resists, even when there is no strength left to get up.
And yet, with its aesthetic proximity, "The Girl with the Needle" makes reverences rather to the cinema of Bela Tarr than to the canvases of Friedrich Murnau. But it hardly claims to experiment or innovate in form - the film works more with the unconscious and tangible: have you ever imagined what pain can be like to the touch? Prickly, like needles driven under your fingernails? Or soft and open, like a bleeding wound? "The Girl with the Needle" gives an idea.
