03/12/2024 - Danish director Jacob Møller’s first feature tells a female-focused story set in the past but resonating with the present, which is sadly lacking in nuance, despite brilliant performances by the cast

Flora Ofelia Hofmann Lindahl and Christine Albeck Børge in Madame Ida

A denied need for love and a rejection or an only sporadically desired experience of motherhood bring three generations of women together in Madame Ida [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the first feature film by Danish director and screenwriter Jacob Møller, which won Best Acting Performance for its female trio of protagonists at the Torino Film Festival.

It’s the 1950s and we’re in an unspecified region of Denmark. In a remote orphanage, fifteen-year-old Cecilia (Flora Ofelia Hofmann Lindahl) is violently slapped by the director of the establishment who is trying to find out who is responsible for this reticent young woman’s pregnancy. Shortly afterwards, Cecilia’s guardian, who brought her in when she was abandoned, asks her to “keep the secret”. Cecilia immediately reveals her repressed rage when she almost throttles another child in the orphanage who called her a whore. The young woman is taken to the titular Madame Ida (Christine Albeck Børge), a 45-year-old woman who lives an isolated life in a sumptuous villa in the sole company of her elderly housekeeper Alma (Karen-Lise Mynster). The deal is that, once Cecilia has given birth, she will return to the orphanage and the baby will be adopted by the director.  

But, as the days go by, a bond develops between the three women. Raised within the cold rooms and dark corridors of the orphanage, deprived of any form of affection, Cecilia now experiences something close to parental care. Ida, meanwhile - a prisoner in her own home, which is full to bursting with furniture and objects, and almost always drunk - is stand-offish but she also exudes a gloomy kind of cheer. She teaches Cecilia to dance and shoot a gun; she involves her in their theatre performances, she showers her with attention and she compliments her on her immature beauty. Alma, who’s also an orphan and aware of the abuse Cecilia has suffered, expresses her own kind of austere concern for the girl. Things change, however, when little Olivia is born. Ida suddenly shows a cruel side and, despite promising to adopt Cecilia as well as her baby, she reminds the former that she’ll soon have to return to the orphanage. Over the course of a dinner to which she has exceptionally invited some old friends, Ida presents the newborn as her own. None of those present believe her, and Ida ends up making a scene which sends her embarrassed guests scarpering - hypocritical and insensitive friends who are all well aware of Ida’s previous experience of motherhood many years earlier, which ended in tragedy.    

With its mise en scene approach, inspired by stylistic models of the past, together with its slow panoramic shots, Stroud Rohde Pearce’s winterly photography conveying the semi-obscurity created by the heavy drapes covering windows which look out upon grey-white snow, and its suffocating set design evoking a magnificent past, all in the service of a character reminiscent of protagonists from a certain kind of classic, black and white Hollywood cinema - alcohol-fuelled, emotionally unstable, ferocious and scathing women trapped in asphyxiating environments, along the lines of Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? - Madame Ida tells a sensitive, female-focused story set in the past (based on Møller’s family’s real-life stories) which also resonates with the present, and places much on the shoulders of his three protagonists whose performances are outstanding and visceral (and were rightly rewarded). But the film falls short of the tense, devastating family dramas which have set Danish cinema apart over the past 20 years, because it takes more than simply depicting men who are only willing to unleash their libidinal drives, mothers who confront the trauma of loss through emotional shutdown and rage, and young women who fall into dysfunctional traps but who lack much-needed shading and consistency, in order to really explore these themes which might otherwise draw the audience in.

Madame Ida was produced by Danish firm Zentropa Entertainments. TrustNordisk are handling international sales.

(Translated from Italian)