Rotterdam Film Festival 2023 | Munch

I started watching this movie knowing only its title (Munch) and that it’s kicking off the  International Film Festival Rotterdam. Briefly I imagined a new wave horror featuring a large monster or cannibal munching on people’s bodies. Within a few seconds I realized: “Oh. Moooo-nk.” This is a biopic of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, creator of The Scream, one of the world’s most recognizable works of art.

Director Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken opens strongly, cutting swiftly between the four actors playing Munch at different stages of his life. An elderly Munch living in Nazi occupied Norway. A young Munch discovering his creative power in the lush countryside of an 1880s Norwegian summer. A middle-aged Munch recovering from an alcohol fuelled breakdown. Finally and most jarringly, a 30-year-old Munch struggling as an artist in modern day Berlin. He’s been transported to what looks a lot like the current year.

Stark contrasts in visual style accompany the shift from Munch to Munch. The youngest and oldest of the Munchs are shot in more straightforward period drama styles, including a gorgeous shot of a painter working in front of his canvas bare-assed, almost consumed by the six foot tall grass swaying in the wind all around him. The middle-aged Munch exists in black in white inside of a shrunken frame. Contemporary Munch looks digital to me.

Dipping in and out of the various time periods creates great energy. We jump from young Munch’s passion for a married woman in the serene countryside to the seizure-inducing lights of a Berlin nightclub. And then a reprieve from the visual assault back in the countryside.

Biopics can be slogs and oscar bait. Munch resists that tendency with its experimentation. But it also seems to defend the simple artistic ambition of biopics, the simple ambition of telling a life story in under two hours. Modern day Munch’s upcoming art exhibit is cancelled by majority vote of the Berlin Arts Council because his work is deemed too simplistic. A day of drinking the pain away with other artistic types leads him to the pulsating Berlin nightclub. Munch hides from his friends that his exhibit’s been shut down, but a man at the club knows and needles him for his simplistic paintings. In my favourite scene of the film, Munch goes off on the guy and attacks hackneyed works that are celebrated just for being multimedia. The punch thrown by the other man to end this altercation doesn’t look very violent, but our Munch sells the impact and physical pain well.

Much of Munch’s works explore deep emotional states, but the film about him chooses to show restraint most of the time, especially the black and white sequences where Munch recovers from almost losing his mind. The Berlin nightclub scene at the centre of the movie is by far the most emotionally intense sequence.

You shouldn’t cause emotional problems by picking your favourite child, and maybe you shouldn’t pick your favourite Munch, but Mattis Herman Nyquist as the modern day Berlin Munch was very captivating to me. The other three Munchs give solid performances but my Munch was a seething live wire from start to finish and played one of the most convincing drunkenesses I’ve ever seen.

Some biopics tick off a list of traumatic childhood events to explain their subject. This film’s structure evades that. Young Munch (Alfred Ekker Strande) gets to have an affair with a married woman while it’s the middle-aged Munch (Ola G. Furuseth) who deals with the catalytic trauma of his sister’s death in adolescence. The four distinct Munchs create a sense of “this has happened to this person” and “this will happen to this person” that feels different than watching one actor donning old age makeup or a fat suit to indicate the same progression. It feels more like the sensation of looking back at old photographs of yourself. The past informs the future and the future informs the past. The old Munch (Anne Krigsvoll, who only made me think once in the film “Wait, is that a woman playing this part?”) absorbs the past Munchs and we see him in them as well as he helps protect the fate of his life’s work from the Nazis.

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