Uncork’d Entertainment
The mockumentary genre is perhaps one of the most complicated ones in modern cinema. The fake documentary was something introduced early in the twentieth century, although it could be argued that This is Spinal Tap reinvented the genre and influenced all future ones. The trick is to balance comedy and drama while maintaining the documentary aesthetics, and this is not always pulled off, even by Christopher Guest.
St. Bernard Syndicate comes from Danish director Mads Brügger, known for documentaries with a Scandinavian satirical edge. There are a lot of improvisational, meta-textual elements to the movie that aren’t clear at first glance. Rasmus Bruun plays Rasmus, an awkward, good natured furniture salesman who discovers near the start of the movie that he has ALS and thus only so long to live before being confined to a wheelchair.
Frederik Cilius Jørgensen plays Frederik (the start of the movie having people play people with the same name), is the son of a wealthy, distant father whom he is desperate to impress. Frederik has the idea for a scheme: Premiere Saint Bernard breeding and related services in China, where the dogs are a hot commodity. Frederik is completely convinced of his own genius and ideas, but his father is not interested in investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in an ill-formed concept.
Frederik runs into Rasmus at a high school reunion and is able to convince Rasmus to invest in his business. Rasmus of course is inspired by his illness to throw caution to the wind and throw away all of his savings, pretending to be a far more successful businessman to go along with the adventure. The duo take Dollar, Frederik’s father’s dog, and run off to Chongqing in China to start their escapade.
What follows is various misadventures, filmed in a tight, intimate style akin to a documentary, with non-established local actors improvising scenes in mixes of Chinese, Danish, and English. Awkward or ‘cringe’ humor is a consistent piece of the film’s concept, with the juxtaposition stark between oddball Rasmus, who always tries hard, and Frederik, who thinks he knows everything but clearly doesn’t.
Due to the nature of the improvisation, some scenes tend to work better than others, but oddly enough, the dramatic moments tend to work better than the weird, borderline absurdist ones. The comedy and movie is often so dry that I would never have thought of it as a ‘mockumentary’ except that it’s how the movie is being marketed. But perhaps there are cultural difference, because I’m more used to the sort of interview style documentary instead of the omniscient, hidden camera style.
The movie does a pretty good job of handling the cultural misunderstandings too, mixing two styles I don’t really see together, Scandinavian weird dark comedy in stiff, awkward Chinese humor. The two lead actors are quite good though, carrying scenes that some of the local actors aren’t really so great in — the story gets a bit weird and convoluted, and I think perhaps hard to follow for a lot of the potential audience.
I think the movie isn’t quite as silly or clearly a comedy as it would need to be for a real crossover success, so instead this will be a little thing of interest in the slow, mostly dead early months of 2019.
St. Bernard Syndicate has a run time of 1 hour 40 minutes and is not rated.
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