Watch out, spoilers!
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I haven’t watched any Danish films for a long time, and then I got caught at the Kinorium by someone in the ratings and decided to see this film “Bench” / Baenken, 2000, directed by Per Flu. This is such a difficult social drama from the lives of socially disadvantaged people. Every morning, a group of people gather on benches near municipal houses, whose appearance and behavior immediately show what layer they belong to, they chat and drink beer, but only until their foreman appears, after which they go to mow the lawns, this is the work they are engaged in. Among them, there is one older person who is very wayward and does not want to obey the general rules, apparently, he considers this a manifestation of pride, but from the outside it looks somewhat different. This is Kai (Esper Christensen) - once quite a prosperous cook, as I understood, by retirement age, who has flopped his whole life, long abandoned his family and drunk almost without interruption. Suddenly, a young woman with a child moves into their house, who has escaped from an aggressive husband, in which he, looking closely, recognizes his long-abandoned daughter. And so both his daughter and her son enter his life, although all this is very painful, especially for his daughter. There are some events, as a result of which they seem to get closer, but alas, it is too late.
I must say that watching this film was quite difficult, to look at such people’s lives is painful, although you understand that most of them came to such a life including through their own fault, however, the fault of certain circumstances that people do not cope with, can also not be excluded. But the film was made well, very impressive. After reading about the director, I found that this film, it turns out, is the first part of a kind of trilogy, the second part of which - "Heritage" / Arven, 2003, with Ulrich Thomsen I watched, the film is not bad, wrote about him, there is another third film "Murder" / Drabet, 2005, where Esper Christensen plays again, perhaps I will watch sometime.