R: Redefining the Prison Drama
By Todd Konrad
Receiving its American premiere at the recent Los Angeles Film Festival, Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer’s visceral prison drama R, forces viewers to identify with the emotional and physical perils of life within a brutal Danish penitentiary. The story focuses on the day to day struggles of Rune, a young Danish hoodlum, and Rachid, a Muslim criminal. Both prisoners formulate a small drug smuggling operation in order to protect themselves from abuse by the older inmates.
However, with twists and turns that are both shocking yet tragically inevitable, the film careens along to its violent climax. Lindholm and Noer were kind enough to share their thoughts about the film as they were in the midst of their LA Film Fest experience.
When asked about the film’s origin and focus on prison life, Lindholm noted that before writing the scripts, both he and Noer “…based the whole thing off of a lot of serious research on the prison that we filmed within. We contacted as many ex-inmates as we could find and let them tell us their stories and experiences whilst inside the prison, and then tried to mold them into a story about these two particular guys arriving to jail and their separate lives within it.”
While the film has an incredible visceral look, which underscores how unforgiving this world that the main characters inhabit is to them. Lindholm insisted that everything the viewer sees is based within real life incident, that while context was adjusted for the story itself, the brutality witnessed on screen is absolutely true. Furthermore, when asked about the tenuous business connection between the Danish and Arab populations, a major key to the overall plotline, Noer noted that despite both groups’ racially motivated rivalry they actually conduct more business inside prison walls than their free counterparts do within normal Danish society. He personally found it interesting “…to create this mini society within society, which is reflective of what is going on in Denmark and Europe in general with these cultural clashes.”
Another area of interest the film creates is its singular point of view, wherein virtually no character backstory is presented whatsoever; the camera simply follows from one character to the next as though one were watching a mere documentary rather than dramatic presentation. For American audiences used to things like The Shawshank Redemption or even the television show Oz, R can be a troubling experience to endure simply because American stories like that attempt to redeem their characters through insight via backstory. Lindholm and Noer noted there were two major reasons for this structural decision.
First, according to Lindholm, “…we wanted the prison, the building in and of itself, to be the main character when we started out because this is the character within which all the other stories would be portrayed. We then made a decision to follow more than one character, so that instead of making the film about the character Rune alone, we just follow him around with the camera instead. And because we also wanted to see the whole jail system, we knew at a certain point we would have to follow someone else in order to move the story into a different ward to portray this other facet within the prison.”
Second, again according to Lindholm and Noer, “…we also found that when we tried to include some backstory about what these characters did to end up inside of the prison, it became less interesting to us because it opened them up to being criticized for the crimes they did rather than focusing on their experiences inside the prison itself and thus risk any empathy you would have with them.”
Wrapping up our conversation, I was curious as to how the film had been received within Denmark itself and without fail, both men noted that while the prison system itself attempted to defend itself no one denied that the accuracy of the film’s portrayal with inaccurate. It is a rather odd assertion to make by basically saying “yes, they got everything right but it really isn’t so bad within our prisons”. The best reaction though apparently came from prisoners themselves as both directors screened R within the actual prison itself where it was shot. Noer poignantly noted that “…These men came in looking like they don’t verbalize their emotions very often but they spoke deeply of the film and we were very proud of that. That they felt it was an honest portrayal of how it feels emotionally to be inside of that place and since we weren’t trying to make a documentary but rather appeal to the emotions that meant a great deal to us.”
R itself will receive its official American theatrical release in early 2011 courtesy of Olive Films, so regular filmgoers can have a chance to see it besides the intrepid festival patrons who took a chance on it in Los Angeles recently. To keep track of upcoming screenings as well as other developments, you can go to www.olivefilms.com