Friday, March 12
Kira's Reason: A Love Story
dir. Ole Christian Madsen, Denmark 2001

Kira's Reason: A Love Story is one of the latest of Dogme 95 movies that since 1995 have taken the world of filmmaking by storm. Please, check out http://www.dogme95.dk/ for the Dogme 95 Manifesto.

Kira's Reason challenges the viewer to reconsider both the conventions of love and those of filmmaking. While watching a Dogme 95 film you never really watch, but rather you experience the story through total sensorial submersion. There is no soundtrack, no special effects, and no behind-the-scenes dialogues--what you see is what you get. After a prolonged stint in a psychiatric clinic beautiful Kira is back to be reunited with her devoted (not to be confused with faithful) husband and kids. Nothing seems to stand in the way of her successful reintegration into the up-scale life of what appears to be an ultimate Danish suburbia. Nothing that is if one overlooks the ghastly inner demons tormenting the woman lost in the obligatory rituals of the mundane. Salvation, however, will not arrive from outside, salvation we are taught is the function of love. What a tender and refreshingly unconventional film! - Maxim Matusevich

Another in a line of Dogme half-wits whose madness is posited as a state of tortured grace, the young wife in Kira's Reason is a woman well past the verge. After a stay in an institution, she returns to her husband Mads (whom we see breaking off an affair early on) and two young boys, but re-entry is not smooth. If the family's grand suburban home suggests pre-sanitarium stability, there's little evidence that Kira's domestic persona was ever as intact as that of, say, Cathy Whitaker in Far From Heaven. Rather, Kira (Stine Stengade) is an aging girl whose reckless energy desperately wants for context amid so much bourgeois bric-a-brac. - Laura Sinagra