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1:1 (One To One)
Verdict: Idealism and reality
Feature Film - 2006 - Denmark - Subtitles - 90 mins
London Film Festival 06 - National Film Theatre - 19 & 23 Oct 06
Per doesn't like blacks - or browns. He and his white friends like Benji detest the immigrants who've come to live amongst them. Per's found dying in a pool of blood. Muslims Tareq and blood-spattered Wisam behave suspiciously. Tareq's brother Shadi is in love with Per's sister Mie - even Shadi thinks Tareq's guilty. Looks like an open and shut case. Benji's ready to pass the word around for gang warfare.
It's a council estate outside Copenhagen, but it could be France, Britain, Germany. It could be anywhere that's desirable to live that doesn't like outsiders much, but may be prepared to give them a chance. The film starts with the original 1960s architects describing estate at the time of its design. 1:1 in architects' language means full-size, full-scale. To everyone else it's direct contact between individuals. The film realises both. All the idealism of the architects suddenly, 40 years later, hits the reality of people separated by being different trying to work out if they can live together.
Per (Jonas Busekist) is lying in hospital in a coma, stuffed with tubes and drips. His mother Søs (Anette Støvelbæk) is a social worker, a pretty woman in her middle years with a careworn face. Her career and private life give no break from reality, and it arrives hard in her house with the attempted murder of her son. Her well-meaning mother (Helle Hertz) comes to stay to look after her, but her only thought is to get her family away from where they are living - and the different-coloured people. Søs is determined to tough it out, and accept others. But she loves her son - should she stay or go?
Security guard Ole (Brian Lentz) is a gentle bruiser who patrols compounds and listens to police broadcasts. It's his dog Congo (Plys) who finds Pers, and Ole who initially saves Per's life with first aide. Ole, Tareq (Subhi Hassan) and Shadi (Mohammed-Ali Bakier) go to the same gym, run by Mo (Mohammed Samhi). Mo won't tolerate assault in the gym, but he'll overlook violent Tareq's previous trouble with the police because it took place outside. And because Tareq - crammed full of anger and bulging with muscles - is the gym's star hope for a forthcoming competition. It's in the gym that Ole hears of Shadi's suspicion about Tareq. Should Ole tell his police contact (Paw Henriksen)?
Per's sister Mie (Joy K Petersen) loves Shadi. But she suspects he knows something - and he won't tell her. Her white friend Benji (Thomas Kirschner) is boiling with anger. But does that mean it's really him that's guilty? Should Mie give Benji the word to punish the Muslims?
Umm Tareq (Rose Copty) - mother to Tareq, Shadi, and their sister Nura (Khadije Nasser) - tries her best to bring up her family in traditional Muslim ways. She'd be furious if she knew Shadi was having sex with a white woman. She can't keep track on what both sons are doing. She interrogates Shadi about what Tareq gets up to. But Shadi keeps quiet - out of loyalty to Tareq, and fear of Tareq's bullying violence. Tareq tells him, and his mother, and hard-working taxi-driver father Abu Tareq (Nassim Al-Dogom), that he's innocent. Should Shadi tell Mie that he thinks that it is Tareq who tried to murder her brother? Should Shadi tell the police?
One To One is a taut study of the meeting of idealism and reality. There's the idealism of the architects - drawing on a line of thinking on how to make life better for people that began with French architect/engineer Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, aka Le Corbusier (1887–1965), founder of the Modern Movement in architecture (in Britain it materialised in the Parker Morris Report 1961 'Homes For Today And Tomorrow', the blueprint for subsequent council housing) - meeting a changed society. There's the idealism of Søs, trying to put her belief in the universality of goodness into practice. And of Shadi, trying to balance family love with his belief in what is right.
Annette K Olesen directs with a light touch and a deft feel for the most economical way of telling the story. Kim Fupz Aakeson's script combines a strong story-line with layers of complex moral structures. Subtly it's revealed that the Muslim family are Palestinian, adding a further layer. Unwanted immigrants swamping a country and driving out the people who live there? Palestine after World War Two? This family, exiled, now watches on TV the murder of children in the Gaza Strip by the people who currently occupy their homeland. And the family are not shown as morally 2-dimensional. They are no more or less tolerant than their white neighbours. The suspected villain Tareq is complex too - it's hard to think he could be other than guilty. He is an unloveable hypocritical thug who behaves as the worst kind of oppressive Muslim cariacature towards his sister. The script creates some stunning characters, who live and breathe - real humans. The warmth, and fallible stupidity, of Brian Lentz's Ole is one; Mohammed-Ali Bakier's good-hearted Shadi another; Anette Støvelbæk's troubled idealist Søs another still. Jonathan Sydenham's elegantly exact and carefully-edited sub-titles make the dialogue effortlessly understandable in English.
One To One sparkles with Molly Malene Stensgaard's lively editing. She cuts it exactly to the mood - moving fast where needed, and letting the pace slow to match impact and thought. Her opening sequence over the titles is a quiet delight. Her concluding sequence is quite brilliant, using a method that contrasts with the main film. The technique of this segment suits precisely the unexpected story it tells - and its dissolving of the present into what must inevitably become the future.
