The Hunt (***1/2)

It’s been a few decades since western countries began broad public movements to root out sexual abuse. No doubt this has been to the good and has reduced the number of child victims, but some people may also remember a number of false accusations in the 1980s against child-care providers, and a side effect may be that men who work with children become slightly suspect. I didn’t know what this film was about when I saw it, but this slight suspicion was part of my reaction when I saw Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen), a divorced father working in a small-town kindergarten. And, as it turns out, the plot centers around an accusation that he has abused his neighbor’s little girl.

In fact, he appears to be the victim of a misunderstanding. The first half of the Danish drama shows the steps by which entirely reasonable people could come to believe in the man’s guilt; the second is more about Lucas’s stunned reaction. Annika Wedderkopp sweetly plays the little girl who cannot anticipate, and only slowly comprehends, the impact of ephemeral remarks. The theme of wrongful accusation has been at the center of several classic films, including Twelve Angry Men, North by Northwest, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Atonement. This isn’t a thriller like North by Northwest and doesn’t focus on the legal case like the other three; it’s a smaller kind of film, but powerful in its way. Director Thomas Vinterberg is still probably best known for his 1998 feature The Celebration; this film is its equal.

IMDb link

viewed 8/8/13 at Ritz East and reviewed 8/8/13

Good Dick (***)

A comical romance isn’t necessarily a romantic comedy, and a movie about sex doesn’t have to show any skin, even with a title like Good Dick, even with a female lead (Marianna Palka) whose main leisure activity is watching soft-core porn. That the male lead (Jason Ritter) is a video-store clerk who lives in his car and whose pick-up technique is to follow her home gives you some idea of why the movie doesn’t fit neatly into that genre.

I imagine that the hardest part of writing a movie like this is making the meeting of the two characters seem genuine. Many viewers may feel that stalking is not, in real life, a successful pick-up technique, or at least not one that a screenwriter should countenance by balancing that with other, more flattering traits. Indeed, some will be put off straightaway by these introductory aspects of the story. But then, without having someone nearly force his way into her life, the woman’s story is only her living alone in a Los Angeles apartment. Simultaneously craving human contact and being repelled by it, she pushes and pulls him in ways that are odd, humorous, disturbing, and erotic in a completely non-explicit way.

That screenwriter, incidentally, is director/lead actress Palka, who has written herself a role in which she excels. Made on a $200,000 budget, it is as narrowly focused as you might expect from an 86-minute debut. The guys at the video store comprise most of the other characters, though Tom Arnold has a small, non-comical role near the end. In the manner of any decent indie film, Palka allows the viewer to fill in the more obvious story details, and after a smartly written denouement, exits before allowing things to get trite.

IMDB link

viewed 10/29/08 [screening at Ritz Bourse]; reviewed 10/31/08