She may have a loving husband and a decent career as a lawyer. While her incestuous affair with her teenage stepson Gustav (Gustav Lindh) gives her bliss, their forbidden love leads to a web of lies and betrayal.īefore both Anne and Gustav consummate their feelings, the film presents Anne’s sedate daily routine as a way of indicating her motivations for engaging in her affair. However, Anne (Trine Dyrholm) initially acts as the “Alice” of the storyline, falling down a rabbit hole of conflicting desire before slowly becoming the titular Queen and acting as her own worst enemy. Opens: November 1 in theaters.Queen of Hearts, Denmark’s Oscar submission for Best International Feature Film, is indeed a slight parable to Alice in Wonderland. Screenwriter: Maren Louise Kaehne, May el-ToukhyĬast: Trine Dyrholm, Gustav, Lindh, Magnus Krepper Reviewed for & linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten © 2019 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online El-Toukhy is satirizing our own president?ġ27 minutes. The film is as sophisticated as is Scandinavia, and dare one say that in fashioning the principal woman as one with the feeling that she is rich, educated, and superior and can get away with anything, that Ms. Perhaps she is a Danish Donald Trump-not that she would try getting away with shooting someone on Jægersborggade, the busiest street in Copenhagen, but that under her husband’s nose she can cuddle up with a young lad, a disturbed one at that, without harmful consequences. The only thing that concerns her is being caught. And since the shots are taken in Denmark and not Alabama or Mississippi, there is no implication that she feels sinful. “Queen of Hearts” has no problem showing some hardcore sex with the boy, doggy style, and with her husband, missionary choice, because, well, it sells, and Denmark’s being Denmark can’t hurt. You would think that a successful lawyer would be enjoined by the illegality, being instead simply fearful of discovery by someone in her family such as her grown sister. There is an implication that at her age, she realizes that the wrinkles are inevitable, the limited sex with her husband just OK, and that she wants to prove that she’s still hot and able to seduce someone one-third her age. After allowing the teen to put a symbolic tattoo on her arm, she takes a bold and misguided chance on leaving a dinner party with the boy, taking him to a bar, and kissing him on the lips. While Peter (Magnus Krepper), the guilt-ridden divorced father whose son Gustav (Gustav Lindh) is now taken back into the older man’s home, Peter’s wife Anne, who is not having enough sex with Peter, opens up to the boy while her husband is away. Director el-Toukhy and her co-writer Maren Louise Käehne dig into the intrigues involving three people living under one roof in a lavish home with acres of grounds-a doctor, a lawyer, and a disturbed teenager whose father was “not there for him” during the kid’s early years. Most important, while nobody is having his way the wife of the murdered king as in “Hamlet,” we’re dealing with another sordid affair–between Anna (Tryne Dyrholm) a woman in her late forties, and her sixteen-year-old stepson Peter (Magnus Krepper).Ī common theme in literature, theater and film is the idea that if you peel back the outer layers of even our most civilized and financially comfortable people, you will find emotions that could well suit up a film of horror and desolation. May el-Toukhy, following up her “Long Story Short” about a group of Danes meeting at different parties, shows in her third feature movie that there’s no murder involved in “Queen of Hearts,” but there is certainly an element of revenge. There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark. ADULTERY, COMING-OF-AGE, PERVERSION, QUEEN OF HEARTS
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