LIKE SOME HYBRID of Memento and Last Year at Marienbad, Christoffer Boe's 2003 Cannes Camera d'Or winner Reconstruction raises far more questions than it can possibly answer. Showily self-conscious, the film openly compares itself to a magic trick, but one whose spectators huddle afterward to determine just what they have seen, rather than a real crowd-pleaser.
Alex and Aimee are a young couple who meet cute in a Copenhagen bar—or do they? From the very start, Boe sows confusion as to whether the lovers are playing a game whose rules are kept shadowed from us. Both Alex and Aimee turn out to have significant others—Alex has a longtime girlfriend, Simone, and Aimee is married to August, a writer. Aimee and Alex spend the night together, but upon returning home, Alex finds that his apartment has vanished. As he puts it to his landlord, "I can't get into my flat—there's kind of no door." His girlfriend and best friend also seem to have no clue who he is, his entire existence appearing to have been swallowed without a trace. Or is all this August's new novel, the work he is ignoring his wife to complete?
Reconstruction is too precious by half, its conceits about love coated with half-baked notions about time and fate. The engine driving such head-scratchers as Memento and Mulholland Drive is a tightly controlled narrative, where clarity and confusion are parceled out in equal doses. Here, part of the confusion is a murky, slippery plot that deliberately prevents much in the way of understanding. Boe makes the mistake of overstuffing his film with Macguffins, shooting speculations fairly indiscriminately in every direction. I, for one, was so distracted by the rather shocking disappearance of Alex's apartment, a truly unsettling turn of events mostly ignored thereafter, that I entirely missed the fact that Aimee and Simone are played by the same actress.
Boe bookends the film with a magician levitating a cigarette—a trick, the narrator explains, that requires a man, a woman and laughter. Boe flicks 100 cigarettes into the air, in the hope that one will stay there. The narrator reminds us that all this is film, merely a construction. Reconstruction is a half-finished edifice, one whose bare wires and exposed joints reveal an inexperienced builder.
Angelika Film Center, 18 W. Houston (Mercer St.), 212-995-2570; call for times, $10.
Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, 1886 B'way (betw. 62nd & 63rd Sts.), 212-757-2280; call for times, $9.50.
SAUL AUSTERLITZ
