02/11/2010

The debut feature of Danish director Kaspar Munk, Hold Me Tight [+see also:
trailer
film profile], premiered in the Alice in the City section of the Rome International Film Festival, currently underway. The film looks at four young teenagers whose lives are changed after a little after-school lie gets out of hand.

Sara (Julie B. Andersen), Mikkel (Frederik Christian Johansen), Hassan (Hicham Najid) and Louise (Sofia Cukic) are classmates. Sara's mother is too busy to look after her and her little brother, and the shy girl is not very popular at school. Louise, who has just broken up with Hassan, is everything that Sara is not.

Hassan's best friend Mikkel secretly seems to have an eye on the girl, and his conflicting emotions about this, in combination with a lie probably caused by (unfounded) jealousy prove an explosive combination.

Unfortunately, the screenplay by Jannik Tai Mosholt is too muddled to properly tackle the big subjects under the microscope here, and the final impact of what should have been a tough and hard-hitting work about bullying and adolescents' nascent scene of guilt and self-worth is rather mute.

The problem resides mainly in the fact that the film can't decide whether it has one, two or four protagonists, which makes the film feel disjointed even as the actions are limited and locations few. Thankfully, the four young protagonists are uniformely strong, and their naturalistic but finely nuanced performances suggest Munk is a very detail-oriented actors' director.

Technically, the film is impressively handled, with the cinematography and lighting especially noteworthy for its subtle contrasts of dark and light.

The film was produced by Nimbus and was released in Denmark in September. It is sold internationally by NonStop Sales.