Smitten with a woman he sees on the subway platform, Alex (Nikolaj Lie Kass) impulsively leaves his girlfriend, Simone (Maria Bonnevie) in pursuit of the stranger. Alex and Aimee (also played by Maria Bonnevie) first share a conversation in a bar, and then spend the night together in her hotel room. But there's a hitch: Aimee is married. This beautiful stranger has accompanied her husband, a renowned author (Krister Henriksson), on his book tour to Copenhagen. Suddenly, she is making plans to leave her noncommunicative husband and run away with her new lover. Meanwhile, following his night with Aimee, Alex finds his world turned upside down and inside out. He returns to his apartment to find that it doesn't exist, and neither Simone, nor his friends and family, know who he is. Is this a sign that he should pursue a life with Aimee? Or is the universe simply trying to teach Alex a lesson? This debut feature film from director Christoffer Boe, who also cowrote the screenplay, received the Camera d'Or and the Youth Prize at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.
The layered narrative reminded me, strangely, of an Alain Robbe-Grillet novel or short story. The following is from the New York Times review by A. O. Scott:
Set amid the graceful and austere architecture of Copenhagen — its luxury hotels and quiet restaurants, its classical squares and fluorescent subway stations — "Reconstruction" is an enigmatic urban romance with a gilded, fashion-magazine look and a literary soul. It is organized around the kind of philosophical conceit you might find in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges or Julio Cortázar, though it pursues its main idea with decidedly Nordic gravity.
The idea, plainly and conventionally put, is that falling in love changes everything, a banal enough notion that Mr. Boe has the audacity to interpret literally. One night, Alex (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), a saturnine young photographer, is on his way home with his girlfriend, Simone (Maria Bonnevie), when he catches sight of Aimee (also Ms. Bonnevie, but with looser hair and brighter lipstick). Instantly smitten, he follows Aimee to a bar, and then to her hotel room, from which her husband, August (Krister Henriksson), a novelist much older than she, is conveniently absent.
The next morning, Alex awakens to discover that as some kind of cosmic result of his dalliance with Aimee, reality as he knows it has been decisively rearranged. Neither Simone nor his best friend recognizes him, and his apartment no longer exists. A second meeting with Aimee, at a quiet restaurant, only deepens his confusion, since it is unclear whether she has any memory of the previous night.
While the movie is some what pretentious and overly arty, it still offers a rather unique (by any Hollywood standards) look at love and identity. This is a film that some people will loathe, but if you enjoy philosophical films that don't tell you what you should take away from the film, this is a good one to rent.
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