Sensory cinema
RETROSPEKT is a film that is seen and felt through Mette’s perspective, told in the first person, as it were, and in an arena that I refer to as sensory cinema. I work intuitively and associatively; conveying a feeling is as important to me as telling a story. I do not want to illustrate Mette’s life, but I want to show her interpretation of that life, her experience, her fractured reality with all its clumsy negotiations.
Music & sound
Music and sound design have always played a very important role for me in realising this sensory cinema and in the oscillation between the objective and subjective. The sound designer, Dan Geesin, and I always works in parallel; he uses the same elements that I use to develop the film, without simply illustrating the script.
The music in RETROSPEKT emphasises the film’s fairy tale-like feeling. The excessively operatic music is romantic, absurd and dramatic. It narrates a parallel emotional development and uses humour to create distance when either the audience or Mette need a little space or time to think. Part of Geesin’s intuitive art is his ability to simultaneously create an emotional connection with the audience and Mette’s development.
Themes
Our raison d’être
With the declining importance of religion, politics and family values in our individualistic society, we must seek our raison d’être anew and within ourselves. When everything seems possible, meaninglessness always lurks nearby. This vague, tormenting, but clearly recognisable and contemporary feeling of unrest manifests itself in many facets of life and is concealed by a thick layer of daily goals, priorities and the embodiments of success.
With Mette, this restlessness manifests itself in her need for control and it is precisely this control that she loses several times in the film.
‘Now’ versus ‘in retrospect’
Time is perhaps the greatest enemy of our carefully set priorities and of our control over our lives. The unexpected can expose the futility of a well-developed plan, or the millisecond that changes everything.
RETROSPEKT plays with this absurdity by giving it a central role in the film itself and in its structure. This playing with time is an essential part of the audience’s experience of RETROSPEKT. The narrative’s non-linear chronology is a necessity that results in a feeling of displacement and disorientation that is essential for an awareness of Mette’s perspective. This physical framing lets Mette fluctuate between what she was, what she is, and what she wants to be but can’t.
Motherhood and its associated social expectations
The film also deals with the self-evident expectation of unconditional maternal love, not only from mothers but from women in general. Some mothers do not hold babies above all else. This is all too often confused with postnatal depression, which is something I deliberately did not thematise in the film, because it would have implied that women who are not instantly smitten with their newborn children can only be regarded as victims of hormonal imbalance. As I see it, this is a simplistic and outdated perception that needs to be addressed, socially and across the world. (Esther Rots)
