Denmark’s Oscar® 2019 Entry for the Best International Feature ‘Queen of Hearts’
Director May el-Toukhy tackles a subject that has not yet been explored and is frightening in the possibilities it reveals to us as women assume positions of power and authority. The troublesome specter of exploitive female sexuality is also elaborated upon in the Dutch Oscar submission, ‘Instinct’.
Two highly developed Western European nations, Denmark and The Netherlands, take female sexuality to extremes here in ways we only saw before as men’s terrain with such films as Last Tango in Paris or In the Realm of the Senses.
My initial reaction to both films was a sort of shame, as if somewhere deep inside of me, I understood the impulse that impelled both these women to venture into forbidden zones of action, but wished it had not depicted it so graphically. It would take a psychiatrist to explain the impulse in human nature that makes us enter dangerous sexual territories. And we as women are more accustomed to seeing this territory as expressed through the male gaze than through the female gaze. However, an artist, by definition, transgresses borders and these two brave women directors dare to expose and share a vision of the worst sort of transgression in which a person uses their position of authority to shackle a less powerful person and then have sex with them. How like the worst of male sexual predators the protagonists of both Queen of Hearts and Instinct become.
Read more about Instinct here.
The star of Queen of Hearts, Trine Dyrholm is a tour de force. One of Denmark’s most famous and successful actresses, she is also one of the most daring actresses in the world, taking on roles not only as “difficult” women, but as women we might prefer not to encounter, even in our own (worst) fantasies.
In the 1998 Thomas Vinterberg (uncredited) film, The Celebration, Dyrholm landed the breakout role as a bewildered hotel maid in the chaotic family drama. The Celebration was the first film created under the strict rules of Dogme 95.
She also won acclaim for her role as a tortured miracle worker in In Your Hands, the Dogma 95 commemoration of its tenth anniversary. Then she played the bitter wife and mother in the Susanne Bier Oscar-winning drama In a Better World.
Mesmerizing audiences and critics all over the world in her well-chosen roles such as the family TV drama The Legacy, Susanne Bier’s All You Need Is Love, Nikolaj Arcel’s A Royal Affair and Thomas Vinterberg’s The Commune, for which she won a Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2016; she even directed a couple of episodes in the 2017 final season of The Legacy.
In the fall of 2017 Trine Dyrholm played a very tough role in Italian biopic Nico, 1988 showing a Nico most of us had no idea existed after her Warhol days. The film won worldwide accolades including The Horizons Award at the Venice Film Festival.
In Queen of Hearts, Dyrholm plays Anne, a brilliant and dedicated lawyer specializing in children and young adults at risk. She lives what appears to be the picture-perfect life with her doctor-husband, Peter, and their twin daughters. She jeopardizes both her career and her family when she seduces her teenage stepson and is forced to make an irreversible decision with fatal consequences.
Queen of Hearts explores the making of a tragic family secret step by step, as the consequences of hubris, lust and lies conspire to create an unimaginable dilemma.
Watch the trailer here.
Playing opposite of Dyrholm is Swedish upcoming talent Gustav Lindh, winner of the Rising Star Award at Stockholm Film Festival in 2017.
He has been working nonstop since his breakthrough appearance 2015 in The Circle. He has appeared on TV-series such as Spring Tide and Jordskott as well as his first feature film lead in En jävla cirkus.
He graduated Malmö Theatre Academy in 2017.
In 2020 he will also appear in the mini TV series, The Days the Flowers Bloom (by Jonas Gardell for SVT), Love, Love Me Not (by Josephine Bornebusch for Viaplay) and Topdog (based on Jens Lapidus novels for TV4).
Magnus Krepper, a critically acclaimed Swedish actor, has been active both on stage as well as in film and TV. In 2005 he received a Guldbagge for best supporting actor for his role in Mun mot mun. His most recent productions include feature films Becoming Astrid (directed by Pernille Fischer Christensen), Before the Frost (by Michael Noer) and tv-series Fröken Frimans Krig and Liberty.
May el-Toukhy (1977) was born and brought up in a suburb of Copenhagen, by her Danish mother and Egyptian father. She has a background in theatre, and graduated from The Danish National School of Performing Arts in 2002, before she moved on to film and graduated from the National Film School of Denmark in 2009.
Her first feature film and national breakthrough Long Story Short was a success among both the audience and critics, and won her, her writer and members of the cast several awards. The film was made in collaboration with producer Caroline Blanco and author Maren Louise Käehne whom she has known since film school, and Trine Dyrholm who also starred in the film. The four decided to continue the vibrant coalition on Queen of Hearts. Apart from doing feature films el-Toukhy has also been working in theatre, directed radio-plays and episodes of the award-winning TV series The Legacy and “Ride Upon the Storm for Danish Broadcasting Corporation. Queen of Hearts is her second feature.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
Queen of Hearts is the story of a tragic fall from grace.
I’ve made many mistakes in my life. I’ve made bad decisions, faltered when it mattered, and shown poor judgment over and over again.
Some of the missteps can be overlooked and boxed away. Some have had painful consequences for others, and myself, and the ensuing shame and guilt of harming others has created a burden I have to carry: A burden which continues to shape me for better and for worse.
That’s how it is for most people: our flaws and insufficiencies define us. They help us grow if we have the capacity to admit our errors, but if we are not capable of doing so they can taint and shatter us, and eventually create great inner loneliness.
In Queen of Hearts, a powerful woman makes a series of irreversible decisions that have unimaginable consequences for her and the people she holds dear. The film explores how far we are willing to go, once those choices are made, to protect ourselves and maintain the status quo in our existence.
Power is a strong overall theme. The power structures of families often convey truths about power structures in general; the apparent yet often invisible power hierarchy in families fascinates me because it is seldom spoken about, yet lived almost by primal instinct.
With this story, I want to explore the sense of entitlement that comes with being in power and what can happen when we do not take the responsibility that comes with authority seriously, whether it being in our private or professional lives.
We have a tendency in the world of fiction to tell stories about the idea that there is something good in the evil, but we seldom tell stories about the evil in the good, even though it also contains eternal truths about human behavior. It’s my ambition to address this schism and at the same time aim towards telling a story where spectators are confronted with their own beliefs and are encouraged to take a stand as the story plays out.
To enhance this vision, I choose to block many of the scenes of the film somewhat democratically — in one-takes and in two-shots, in opposition to consistently maneuvering the audience by cutting to close-ups to underline dramatic significance or change of emotional state.
Even though there is an obvious primary main character dramaturgically, it was important for me to leave space visually for the spectators to shape their own opinions in regard to the characters actions. By doing so, I hope to empower the story to force questions not necessarily provide answers.Director May el-Toukhy (upcoming Karen Blixen biopic The Lioness) celebrated the film’s world premiere at 2019's Sundance Film Festival, where it won The Audience Award for World Cinema Dramatic. She also won the world’s most lucrative film award for the film, The Goteborg’s Dragon Award.
Read the entire interview with May el-Toukhy on Cineuropa. Excerpts of the interview by Ola Salwa follow below.
Cineuropa: What inspired you to make this film?
May el-Toukhy: I started working on this project when I was very interested in how family secrets are born. At that time, I lost someone very close to me, and soon after that, a lot of secrets surfaced. That made me think about all of those untold things that people carry around with them, and when they pass away, they don’t get revealed unless someone knows about them. So basically I wanted to explore the making of the family secret. Then I started to talk to my co-writer, Maren Louise Kaehne, about it, and over time, we read quite a few articles about female teachers who had sex with pupils. We discussed how that narrative is different and how people tend to over-romanticize a relationship between an older woman and a younger man, as opposed to one between an older man and a younger woman. We instantly know that the idea of a stepfather having sex with his stepdaughter is simply wrong, whereas when it’s a boy and his stepmother, it’s more of a grey area. It becomes hard to define what is wrong and what is right here.
Why do you think that is?
Party because male sexuality and assault on men is a taboo. Also, many men don’t realize that they have perhaps been assaulted. There’s a fairly condescending way of discussing this issue: some people say, “Ok, so why wouldn’t a 17-year-old boy want to have sex with an experienced woman? What’s he moaning about?” For them it might not have been assault, but rather a great first or second sexual experience. But for some men, it was wrong, and it felt wrong; they just didn’t have the language to express that. And if they can’t talk about it, that experience can take up space in one’s soul and pop up in future relationships. I hope my film raises awareness of that issue and inspires victims to seek help.
A female sexual predator who preys on a younger man is a character we rarely see in films. What research did you both do before you wrote the script?
We read a lot of articles, essays and books, and even got as far as the Greek myth about Phaedra, who wanted to seduce her stepson, and when he rejected her, she accused him of rape. We didn’t watch films, because there are not a lot that actually tackle that theme. But the real breakthrough for me was meeting with a therapist who specializes in such cases and who has worked with both sides — the victims and the perpetrators. She told us, for example, what kinds of families it happens in. I didn’t feel the need to talk to predators who were in therapy; we had already accumulated a great deal of information, and I didn’t want our film to be a retelling of a specific case. I would have felt the obligation to honor that person or not to honour her. Also, for me as a filmmaker, it’s important to tell a broader story that many people can identify with.
Is there a pattern that you identified in these cases?
Yes, people who engage in a sexual relationship within their family are often lonely, and they long to be seen. Many of them have experienced violence themselves, when they were very young, for example. I’m not saying that every abused person will become a predator; it’s just one of the factors. Adult perpetrators of assault often orchestrate “a grooming process” that usually starts with the older person confiding in the younger one and making the younger one confide in them. They win their trust, treat them like grown-ups and have “adult” conversations. That relationship can evolve into a sexual one.
You imbue the main character with many different nuances; she is not simply a bad person doing horrible things.
For me and my writer, and especially when tackling this topic, it was extremely important to make that character as complicated as possible. Because even though she does monstrous things in the film, she was also once an innocent child who grew up under circumstances that made her who she is. And I also find it both fascinating and scary that there are currently so many stories about people doing both good and bad things. Trine Dyrholm is an actress who is very interested in complexity, so we were challenging ourselves at all times, and we kept on discussing whether what we were doing was true to the human condition.
International sales agent Trust Nordisk has sold most of the world including the U.S. to Breaking Glass Pictures. After its n addition to DVD, Queen of Hearts will be available to rent/buy on iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Google Play, and Vudu.
RT: 127min
SCREENPLAY BY: Maren Louise Käehne. May el-Toukhy
PRODUCED BY: Caroline Blanco, René Ezra (Becoming Astrid, A War, A Highjacking)
Audience Award, World Cinema — Sundance Film Festival
Audience Award Best Nordic Film, Jury Awards Best Nordic Film and Best Performance — Göteborg Film Festival
International Film Festival Rotterdam
Zurich Film Festival
