48/50
Copenhagen 1919: A young worker is unemployed and pregnant. She meets Dagmar, who runs an underground adoption agency. A strong bond develops, but her world falls apart when she discovers the shocking truth behind her work. Denmark’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards in 2025. It’s the final days of the Great War, and Karoline is barely scraping by as a factory worker. She considers herself a widow because her husband disappeared during the war (even though Denmark wasn’t actually involved), but she doesn’t receive widow’s benefits because he wasn’t listed as deceased. There’s a lot going on in the film, and I don’t want to give away any details, so I won’t go into much detail about the plot, other than to say that the marketing emphasizes something that isn’t as important a part of the film as you might expect. Although there’s a lot of attention paid to it in the second half of the film, the real value of the film for me is the sense of realism surrounding Karoline’s story. When was the last time someone in a movie tried to convince a potential tenant to rent an apartment by telling them they could have running water for two hours a day (from 10am to noon, which may not be a great sales pitch since most people would be working those hours)? When was the rampant drug use of that era portrayed so honestly? Even what Dagmar does was relatively common at the time, although I would venture to say that by this point it was on the decline and not happening as often as it had been in the past. I actually might have enjoyed the movie more if the marketing had been different and Dagmar hadn’t been mentioned, because that would have set the expectation. While Dagmar is the main character, the movie is clearly about Caroline and her struggles. On the other hand, it’s hard to say how I would have felt seeing the name Dagmar Overby on the door if I hadn’t known ahead of time that this was a real person being used in the movie. (It should be noted that the movie is inspired by real-life events, not based on them, so the creators try to maintain some distance from the real Dagmar.) I feel like some of the audience will have a hard time understanding Karoline because at times it seems like she makes the right decision a little too late. At the same time, there isn’t a lot of time or opportunity for ethics when you’re just trying to survive in a world where the odds are stacked against you. On the other hand, even though we know that the hope she was given would be worthless in this world, we still understand why she succumbs to it. I like the look of the film. It’s black and white, and the entire town seems run down and barely hanging on. It reminds us of the lack of concern for prosperity or even contempt for the working poor. Have things really changed that much? The times depicted were over a hundred years ago, but the concept of female bodily autonomy is still under constant attack. Of course, all art is in some way a reflection of the time in which it was created, but here it’s just easier to see the similarities.