Danish black comedy The Art of Crying has been a hotly anticipated film around these parts, the film’s pitch of a young boy killing village residents to provide his father the chance to eulogize them ringing a darkly comic bell but, unfortunately the film does not live up to expectations on any level. The Art of Crying simply does not know what sort of film it wants to be and, more importantly, what sort of film it should be.
The film revolves around Allan, an eleven year old boy growing up in rural Jutland in the 1970’s. With his older brother Asger away at school Allan lives at home with his mother, his milkman father and middle sister Sanne. It should be a good environment for a boy to grow up in but for one thing, the father he loves is prone to fits of dramatic depression, frequently breaking into crying fits and threatening to kill himself, forcing the family to find ways of soothing his fragile spirit or risk losing him. When Allen realizes that the thing that makes his father happiest is to deliver eulogies he sets out to find – or create – opportunities for him to do just that.
This is the film as presented in the press materials and on that level it certainly seems fertile ground for morbid black comedy, an effect the film certainly reaches for, particularly in the early going. But The Art of Crying also wants to be considerably more than that, and this is where things break down, and break down badly. Serving the typical Danish urge for realism the film openly acknowledges – and does so very early – that Allan’s father has some sort of mental illness and, moreso, that he is molesting his fourteen year old daughter Sanne, who uses sex to soothe her father’s depressive outbursts. This is a story about children manipulated into accommodating their father’s debased urges, manipulated into degrading situations by his dramatics. And, to put it succinctly, what the hell is this film – or any film – doing trying to play child abuse for comedy, or even against a comic backdrop? At its best this is simply horribly misguided, at worst it is utterly repugnant.
While the film does seem to recognize its error at about the half way mark, with Allan slowly realizing that his father is destroying their family, it is far too late at this point, the damage already done. Time that should have been spent establishing characters has been wasted on the attempts at absurdist comedy and what we’re left with are shallow characters portrayed as little more than caricatures and a script that skims weakly over the surface of the serious issues it attempts to raise.
The Art of Crying is simply a failure. It is misguided in approach, poorly written, plagued by single note performances from most of the key cast, not funny in the comic elements, shallow in the dramatic, and poorly paced. Clocking in under two hours it feels double that. Your time is better spent elsewhere.