CLASH OF EGOS (Tomas Villum Jensen - Denmark 2006).
This Danish comedy certainly did well at the IFF Rotterdam, where it played in a sold-out theater before roughly a thousand people, with most of the audience screaming with laughter during most of the film.
Written by Anders Thomas Jensen, already responsible for a number of hits in Danish cinema, "Clash of Egos" is about Tonny, a short-tempered divorced father who has just served a sentence for acts of violence. Eager to do well, he gets a job at some kind of recycling business and is rewarded a few hours with his two kids every month. During one of these visits, he decides to take them to the movies to see the latest Harry Potter, but it's sold out. The only tickets available are for the latest masterpiece "The Murderer" by the critically acclaimed Danish director Claus Volter, a film - so we learn later - with the all-time low attendance record in Danish cinema of seven sold tickets; "Three in Kopenhagen, three in Arhus and one in Odense", despite being overladen with praise by the critics. When his daughter starts crying during the film, he demands his 473 Kronen back from the theater manager. When this doesn't work, he tries to get his money back from the director himself. When trying to confront Volter during his latest shoot, Tonny makes a bit of a tumble from a scaffolding after a struggle with Volter and ends up in hospital. Now he wants compensation, not in the form of money, but to have the right to be co-director and co-writer of Volkers latest film. Essentially, he really wants to make a film his children would enjoy. Of course, the two men's ideas about film clash with sometimes hysterical results.
Some of the pokes at pretentious art-house filmmakers are perhaps a bit too easy and many of the secondary parts consists of little more than blatant stereotypes, but it's all very funny. I was laughing almost constantly during the second half of the film (as did the entire theater) and the two leading roles are in very good hands with Ulrich Thomsen as Tonny and Nikolaj Lie Kaas as Claus Volker. I've never seen Thomsen in a comic role (actually, I've seen him only once, in "Festen") but he manages extremely well and has an almost perfect comic timing. Typically the kind of film - once things start rolling - where almost every situation becomes outright hilarious, for which much of the credit must go to Anders Thomas Jensen, who knows how to write intelligent comedy AND tell a story in 90 minutes. There are not many contemporary writers in Europe who can do this. A great success.
Camera Obscura --- 8/10
