VIFF '10 Review: Denmark's 'R' A Response To 'A Prophet' But Also Its Own Beast

Trends in film are inevitable. If a certain genre or style of film is successful, filmmakers, like sharks hovering around a dead carcass, will chew off a chunk of flesh for themselves, hoping to recapture something that's worked already. This happens every year, it seems.

Because this is so common in movies, the gritty Danish prison drama "R" will be unable to escape comparisons to Jacques Audiard's "A Prophet," which hit it big at Cannes last year (taking home the Grand Jury Prize, essentially runner-up to Michael Haneke's excellent "The White Ribbon"), then found critical success in the States while also picking up a Best Foreign Language Film nomination at last year's Oscars. Whether intentional or by happenstance on the part of writing/directing duo Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm, the films are inexorably linked.

The film opens when Rune (an excellent Johan Philip Asbæk, looking like a shorter, blond-haired Michael Shannon) is delivered to one of Denmark's oldest and meanest prisons, and subsequently assigned to the most dangerous part. "What did you do to end up in that ward?" a guard asks him. "The others are twice your size, and they're waiting for you. They know you're coming." He's not kidding, there are men in this film of such towering stature, they impose on the camera. The frame is almost unable to contain some of them. The saying "fly on a wall" feels literal here. The audience is merely a speck, a cockroach, looking up at tattooed, pierced giants -- real-life ex-cons and former prison guards make up most of the cast -- onscreen.

From the opening 20 minutes, I was sure I'd already figured this film out. The stakes and setting are laid out well, if not in a very familiar way. We enter the prison, meet our naive protagonist, he strips down for a full body cavity search, is put in his cell, and has to immediately defend his ground. Seeing our hero as a weakling, The Mason, as he's known, wastes no time in forcing Rune's hand in to violence. "You either fuck somebody up, or you get fucked up," he tells him on their first meeting in the prison yard. They want a Muslim prisoner killed. Rune takes the assignment, proving to be more resourceful and vicious then we at first suspect. The murder that follows sets the tone for the rest of the film. It's brutal, unflinching and all-too realistic.

Sound familiar? So this is clearly a rip-off of "A Prophet," then, right? Wrong, actually. It's almost as if the filmmakers had seen Audiard's masterful prison gangster epic -- a more nuanced, detailed and realistic take on the criminal ascending the ranks tale; basically "Scarface" for the arthouse crowd -- and wanted their film to appear so similar at first that it would trick the audience. Rune quickly learns to navigate the system and raise his status in the inmate hierarchy, using his wits with a touch of good fortune. He's an impulsive cleaner, which comes in handy, leading to an opportunity for him to get in on the drug dealing run by The Mason's boss, a man that could've been a worthy adversary to Arnold Schwarzenegger in one of his countless '80s action bloodbaths.

Then there's a moment where it becomes all too clear Noer and Lindholm have other things in mind for their film and lead character. It's almost Hitchcockian, in a way. "A Prophet" proposes that through knowledge and education, the lead character can go all the way to the top. The thesis in "R" is much harsher, more pragmatic: the weak will always be weak in this place, and control of one's fate in this world is but an illusion for people like Rune. He's got the wherewithal to find success (in this case, merely surviving), but that's not enough. There are consequences to screwing up in this environment, and retribution is inevitable; life has little meaning in this self-contained world and film.

The turns of the plot jar the viewer out of that once comforting sense of familiarity. All of a sudden, we're in a different story altogether. Someone else's new nightmare. Cinephiles unfortunately often relish being a step ahead of a film; we've seen it all, so you can't surprise us. When that's subverted as it is so brilliantly here, you have to take your hat off to the artists who pulled it off. That's not to infer "R" is merely a one-trick pony. Far from it, the twists and diversions in the narrative add more pathos, more subtext. It becomes deeper and even more grim.

Cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck employs stylistic elements and techniques not unlike Refn's "Pusher Trilogy," favoring an always mobile, hand-held camera, like a documentarian always ready to catch the next sudden act of violence or drug deal. This on-the-street style, perfected by Scorsese in "Mean Streets," is used a lot these days, to be sure, but when done right (as it is here), it lends the film a sense of visceral urgency that is wholly appropriate. You certainly can't say that about 'Prophet', which is far more graceful and poetic in its imagery and violence. So the comparisons must end there, for "R" is yet another prison movie worth seeking out, because it chooses its own path in the genre, and carves out something sad and artful in return. [A-]

Trailer [via Twitch] below