I've reposted this review of Terribly Happy, which I first caught at PIFF a month ago, to coincide with it's opening this weekend at Fox Tower downtown. I wasn't a huge fan, and it doesn't appear to be getting many good reviews around town, but for lovers of the funny cruelty the Coen brothers have made their name with (or for lovers of the Danish the countryside) this is definitely worth a look.

Terribly Happy - Directed by Henrik Ruben Genz - Denmark - 2009

Opens Friday March 12 at Fox Tower 10, 846 SW Park

by Alex Peterson

Somewhat along the lines of the darkest work of the Coen brothers, this slick piece of Danish cynicism has a psychologically frail young police chief (Robert Hansen) become helplessly entangled in the sexual politics of an incestuous rural town, with nothing but bad consequences. His earnest-yet-warped good intentions are never a match for the town brute, the town brute's damaged-goods wife or any number of oily, smirking townspeople. It's all funny, in a way, and is only aimed at stylish black comedy, but still.

A film only interested in setting up grotesque caricatures  for inevitable doom, and then having a laugh about how neatly awful the whole world is, has only the thinnest ability to entertain on any level. You can't preconceive little tales of ugliness and expect people to agree that the world is a terrible place, or that we should all just give in to the eventual corruption towards which we're all headed: that message is as corrupted as the fictional town it grows out of.

My problem with this kind of movie, no matter how aggressively stylized, is that as soon as we consider how much twisting and finagling filmmakers must go through  to make all the cynical pieces fit, we have to realize that  there is no sincerity behind them, just a glib desire to cackle at misery.

On the other hand, I chose to check out this movie at PIFF based on a combination of an enticing plot synopsis and something I can't place, something like the allure of looking into how people in other countries view their own rural populations. Terribly Happy could never be confused with a docu-real account of the Danish countryside, it's very strenuously warped (trippy) and heavy-handed, but it is popular in Denmark, so it's some kind of idea of how Danes feel about themselves. For that reason, and for some muscular, twisted scenes, this movie ain't all bad.