"Giraffe" -- Movie Review

 

This week at the New Directors/New Films festival, there was a streaming of the Danish drama “Giraffe”. 

Synopsis

When a major construction project causes two of its workers to meet, can they maintain a relationship for the duration of the assignment?

Story

After years of talking and planning, the Danish government is finally undertaking their long-rumored venture of building a tunnel that will connect the island of Lolland to Germany in order to create more jobs and further set up the island for future economic growth.  But there is a downside to this scheme that isn’t at all trivial:  due to eminent domain, a great many of the small island’s residents will be permanently displaced – a number of them elderly people who have been living in the same home for decades.

Due to this major endeavor, the government has assigned many workers to this island on the south of Denmark – among them is Dara (Lisa Loven Kongsli), a 38-year-old ethnologist whose job it is to document the culture and people of Lolland for archival and historic purposes.  She begins to interview many a great many motley soon-to-be former residents of Lolland – these include a farmer, whose business is disrupted; a young couple who look upon this forced move as a blessing in disguise; and senior citizens who are distraught about leaving a home where they’ve raised a family. 

Another worker is Lucek (Jakub Gierszal), a 24 year old laborer from Poland whose initial task is to assist with installing fiberoptic cable to bring high-speed Internet access to the entire island.  His co-workers are older men who have also relocated from Poland in order to support themselves and their family with a well-paying job unavailable to them in their homeland.  Eventually, Lucek crosses paths with Dara and they embark on a steamy relationship.  Later, it is learned that the subcontractor for whom Lucek and his team work is withholding their pay, causing many of his colleagues to immediately stop work and return to Poland.  With Lucek now out of a job but deeply in love with Dara, will he be able to remain in Lolland to sustain their relationship?    

Review

If “Giraffe” is going anywhere (and there’s no guarantee that it is), it’s in no particular hurry to get there.  At only an hour and a half, the story takes its time to get going; it is quite a while before the two lovers even meet each other.  It would seem that the director is more concerned with the setup about the characters than their interaction between each other – which is really what the movie should be about (at least theoretically, anyway).  An audience wants to see a film about other people and you get the sense that this director really just wanted to shoot a documentary – especially given that much of the picture has that documentary-like quality.

“Giraffe” is only partially in English and therefore has a heavy reliance on the use of subtitles.  Therein lies a rather significant quandary.  Technically speaking, the main problem with “Giraffe” has to do with its subtitles – specifically, the color.  They are in white and can be exceedingly difficult to read against a light background.  Why yellow isn’t the default choice of color for subtitles remains a mystery; yellow is a color that can be read against either light or dark backgrounds.  Hopefully, the industry will learn this lesson someday.      

Following the movie, there was a stream of an interview with writer/director Anna Sofie Hartmann.  There is a shot of a giraffe at the beginning of the motion picture and it’s never referenced again later on; Hartmann says that the title of her film came from a safari park located on the northern part of the island of Lolland – it has giraffes, elephants and rhinos.  She was struck by the fact that since these animals are not in their natural habitat, it gave her the idea of what it would be like to live in a place where you don’t really belong or where you’re not originally from.  Hartmann is originally from Lolland and has been fascinated with the changes she’s seen in her hometown over the past few years.