In the last ten years there have been some great movie where drugs are a main focus of the movie,
‘Tainspotting’ ,
‘Pusher’ ,
‘Requiem for a Dream’ and now
‘Angels in Fast Motion’ . This Danish movie grips you with its stylish introductions to the characters and then shows you three lives coping with the gloom of suburbia.
‘Angels in Fast Motion’ , or ‘Nordkraft’ to give it its original language title, is a hard and uncompromising take on three youthful lives, Maria, Allan and Steso, living and coming to terms with drugs, each other and life itself.
Maria (Signe Egholm Olsen) is a drugs trafficker or pusher frau as she refers to herself, who goes to Jutland and picks up drugs for her boyfriend Asger, who is unable to give her the love and affection she needs. They live with two doped out dogs, large Rottwellers that are continuously high on the hash fumes and the stinking pig carcass that Asger is using for a tattoo canvas. Not exactly an ideal situation.
Allan (Claus Riis Østergaard) was injured on board his ill fated ship and he returns home showing the scars from his accident, looking to just get on with life and not fall back into the old traps of the drug world he once inhabited, but some ghosts are harder to remove than others. And after a chance meeting with an old time ‘friend’, Frank (Rudi Köhnke), things are anything but safe.
Steso (Thure Lindhardt), an intellectual, god-forsaken and prophetic cynic has two bad habits, one being of the drug kind. The other is that he possesses his space cadet girlfriend, Tilde (Pernille Vallentin Brandt), who has one foot in the psychiatric chair and the other in some dreamy state of yellow and karma.
These three lives are intertwined through Asger (Thomas L. Corneliussen), the dealer. Maria does not want to make any more trips and that leads to the introduction of Hossein (Farshad Kholghi), a Persian moneylender who has more going on than what he lets on to, who is going to take on her role. Allan is forced into doing a job for Frank, of which he borrowed some money from Hossein, and Steso can’t get grip of loosing Tilde and wants to get some oblivion in the way of the pain.
Ole Christian Madsen forgets the realms of his previous Dogme 95 movie,
‘Kira’s Reason: A Love Story’ , and gives us a stylish and grim movie with a soundtrack to die for, full of hyper camera moves and bouncing POV steadycams, that truly makes us feel that we are as close to those hash fumes as those barking dogs are. The characters are great and very, very believable in their futile attempts to make sense of the madness in the world they inhabit and the mood is kept light enough that it does not become unbearably grim and too downbeat to alienate its viewers.
A great movie and one you should catch when you can.
USA
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