Film

Few things are duller than half-baked attempts at science fiction perpetrated by slumming aesthetes with zero familiarity with or affinity for the genre. This “philosophical” crock by Danish art-house mediocrity Boe (Reconstruction) exemplifies the principle even better than the dystopian dabblings of Margaret Atwood.

Thomsen (the tormented son in Celebration) plays Zetterstrom, an emotionally handicapped Copenhagen concert pianist whose brief fling with a mysterious beauty (Christensen) ends with her abrupt disappearance. Wounded, the musician makes a conscious and effectual decision to repress all his memories concerning and preceding the affair. At the same time that he seals off his past, an entire neighborhood of the city is separated from the outside world by an invisible force field.

Too inert to qualify as “The Vortex,” the isolated area is dubbed “The Zone” by default. Playing a double role of omniscient narrator and benign spirit-guide, Moritzen (the tormenting father in Celebration) takes it upon himself to cure the pianist of his mnemonic constipation by luring him into the Zone. There, Zetterstrom’s past awaits, along with a whole lot of portentous conversation about the nature of, and relationships between, Love, Time, Memory, the Self and other such scintillating bollocks.

A good version of this sort of thing, called The Bothersome Man, ran at Facets Cinematheque a couple of months ago. It’s available from Netflix.