ID:A
Directed by Christian E. Christiensen
Written by Tine Krull Petersen
with Tuva Nuvotny, Flemming Enevold, Jens Jørn Spottag
2011
Sadly a film that doesn't quite manage to live up to your expectations, even though it's mainly showing you how the beginning happened. A woman (Tuva Novotny) wakes up in a stream with a head wound and no memories. She walks into town, finds a room, and discovers her bag contains a million or so euros, a sketched portrait, and a gun. There's a nasty-looking scar on her stomach. Pretty soon some unpleasant men turn up looking for the money, and so begins the obligatory quest to find out exactly what the hell is going on. Fortunately, the quality of the direction (by Christian E. Christiansen) and acting elevate ID:A above a run-of-the-mill thriller. It also looks beautiful, and is solidly designed and put together. In fact it’s an extremely well made film, sadly let down by a cliché-ridden scenario.
This isn’t to say it’s lacking in suspense. As an amnesia-thriller it follows the Memento line rather than The Bourne Identity's, which is to say the focus is on discovering the nature of the character, not on using the nature of the character to drive the action. This more thoughtful mode serves the film well, making for an atmospheric journey where every detail seems significant and every character seems fundamentally untrustworthy. However, the problem is that while the main character is confused and lost, everything is all too familiar to the audience. The clues that bring her closer to her previous life, while quite nicely done, are of an overcooked “Hey I can speak this language!” or “I am curiously drawn to this activity” variety. You realise afterwards as well that quite a few of the more subtle mysteries surrounding the character were not founded on anything deliberate in the script but rather on plain old inconsistency: sometimes she seems resourceful enough for you to wonder if a professionally shady background is going to emerge, other times she just seems a bit thick. A particularly silly moment comes when she stays at a hotel and has to give a fake name rather than reveal she doesn’t know her own. She actually does that casting around for inspiration thing (“My name’s Mr…uh…Chair”), which never rings true; is it really that difficult to think of a name that’s not yours? Especially when you can’t be distracted by your real name because you don’t know it.
It’s not hard to generate mystery when you have an in-built excuse, even an obligation, to just introduce things without any narrative support at all. As with too many films of this type, you are kept completely in the dark until everything is explained in a rush of flashback and/or exposition – it works, but there’s not much art to it. The script takes in radical socialists, political intrigue, domestic abuse, gender issues, private investigators and shiny celebrity society, but all in front of a why-is-this-happening backdrop that means you’re constantly waiting for themes to develop further than they do. This would be fine if it all coalesced into something meaningful at the end, but while everything is tied up neatly, the only striking thing about the ending is how accidental the main character’s involvement really is. It’s not predictable exactly, but only because you're waiting for blanks to be filled in, not events to ensue. The absolute outcome is clear from a mile off, put it that way.
Tom
Tom
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