Charlot and Charlotte

Ole Bornedal has created a highly 'untrendy' tale. Charlot and Charlotte is a happy story – it is one great paean to life and love. Charlot and Charlotte is not part of modern cinematographic art, which tends to cultivate disaster and cynicism. The series is dramatic, with play and laughter – and it makes the point that at the bottom we are happy to be alive. Charlot and Charlotte is the story of the meeting and further development of two apparently quite irreconcilable characters: arrogant, dramatically self-assured Charlot from Manhattan and diffident, self-effacing Charlotte from a Danish country town. As fate would have it, the two women bump into one another at Copenhagen Airport one late evening when they both seem to have been stood up. When it truns out that they are both being followed – for very different reasons – they suddenly find themselves in Charlotte´s car on their way out of the city on a journey, an escape, whicht takes them all the way through the beauty of the Danish spring, from Copenhagen to Skagen. On the way they encounter a number of very different characters. Everyone from con men, swindlers and fraudsters – the odd serial killer disguised as a transvestite, a police chief called Orson, the senile old poetic Birksted on the run from a big Copenhagen hospital because he wants to die in his arm chair looking out across the beautiful Danish countryside, a mad theatrical manager who pushes Charlotte on stage as Ophelia when the real star turns sick, the unpredictable, narcissistic TV host, the anaesthetist at the frustrating hospital with time for coffee but not the patients, the tormented nursing home residents terrorised by Nurse Ratchet in the murky little village, the woman with the gift of the second sight in a back yard, the big, bluff fisherman who wins Charlotte´s heart in the end and makes it flare up like a volcano – and the quiet, gentle guy who finally defreezes Charlotte. And – this is not just the story of a harpy and clumsy clogs who gradually learn from one another, growing into two wonderful women worthy of emulation. It is also a witty satire on our own day and the people who populate it.