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minor mishaps
The only real bright spot in Berlin in February - a month when the city is at its coldest and greyest - is the Film Festival. And one of the brightest spots in that Festival last year was a small Danish comedy called Italiensk for begyndere (Italian for Beginners). Initially regarded by industry analysts as something of a line-up filler, Lone Scherfig's film began to create a buzz immediately after its first press screening. Before long, additional Market screenings were being organised, and the word on the Potsdamer Platz was that you had to be there a good half-hour in advance to be sure of getting in - a rumour which proved, if anything, an understatement.
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Time was, calling a film a 'Danish comedy' was not a great selling point. Italian for Beginners changed all that - and Minor Mishaps looks like doing so all over again. Except that, as Ib Tardini, producer of both films, tells Nick Roddick, they're not really comedies: it's just that, as with life, it's OK to laugh…
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By the time the Festival was over, Italian for Beginners had sold to almost every major territory and had a US distribution deal with Miramax. It made the final eight in the nominations for European Film 2001 at the EFA awards, also in Berlin, in December and is currently Denmark's submission in the Best Foreign-Language Film category at the Oscar's, providing the country with its best chance of a gong since the double whammy of Babette's Feast and Pelle the Conqueror in 1987/88.
Everyone, of course, loves a surprise success. But if the above-mentioned industry analysts had looked a little closer at Italian for Beginners, they might not have been so surprised. Director Scherfig may have been more or less unknown outside Denmark, but the film's producer, Ib Tardini, was a 30-year veteran, who had worked with such festival and Oscar-winners as Bille August, Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. And the production company, Zentropa Entertainment (in which Tardini is a partner) has defied fashion by remaining European flavour of the month since von Trier's Breaking the Waves.
Tardini knew exactly what he had with Italian: a film whose success depended on its ability to steer the narrow route between comedy and serious drama. And he has exactly the same take on his latest project, another not-quite-comedy called Minor Mishaps (Små ulykker in Danish), which will follow Italian into the Berlin competition next month.
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"Family is not something you choose. It's something you just get. You'd never choose those kind of people as your friends"
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"You could never sell Italian for Beginners as a comedy," says Tardini in the mixing suite for Mishaps, "and you couldn't do so with this one. I only want to produce interesting stories" - there must be a lot of interesting projects in Denmark, because Tardini is, as usual, currently working on two or three films simultaneously - "and Minor Mishaps has exactly the same kind of feel. It's about the everyday problems of today, which aren't necessarily funny. The stories are realistic, but when you look at people and their strange way of reacting to problems, you realise it's OK to laugh. And people do laugh a lot."
Minor Mishaps is about a family every bit as dysfunctional as the one in that other Zentropa almost-comedy, Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (Celebration). But here, it is a death, not a family reunion, that brings things to a head. The death is that of Ulla (Vigga Bro), the matriarch of a dynasty that has muddled through without ever properly coming to terms with the real world.
Ulla's husband, John - played by Jørgen Kiil, an actor whose face is familiar to every Danish TV viewer of a certain age for his playing of Lugge in seventies TV series Smuglerne - has been married to her for 46 years and settled into a comfortably lazy existence. His brother, Søren - Jesper Christensen, a European Film Academy nominee as Best Actor for his role in last year's Danish hit, Bænken (The Bench), another Tardini production - is a carpenter with an ankle injury that will at last allow him to put his feet up… or so he thinks.
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