This movie begins as many conventional period romances set in Mitteleuropa do: at a formal event in the 1910s, as an ambitious young military man, Anton, asks a daughter of nobility, Edith, to dance. She is willing, but a complication becomes clear as she attempts to rise from her chair: She wears braces on her lower legs, which are paralyzed. She totters forward, and there is a fair amount of embarrassment to go around, but Anton, seeking through Edith a path to the favor of the nobility, is not deterred.
“The Kiss,” the latest picture from the prolific Danish director Bille August, is adapted from “Beware of Pity,” the sole novel the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig published in his lifetime. Its narrative is persistently discomfiting, but August often tells it in a way that emphasizes the picturesque; if you weren’t paying attention to the postures of its characters, you could possibly mistake it for something genuinely romantic like “Elvira Madigan.”
Anton is played by Esben Smed, who’s clearly trying to tamp down his character’s essential callowness, while Clara Rosager shows purposeful restraint in her work as the smitten and hopeful Edith. The picture moves at a stately pace that one supposes was considered period-appropriate but feels merely logy at times. August and his co-screenwriter, Greg Latter, juggle Zweig’s chronology a bit and try to compound his ironies. Then they take a whack at ameliorating those ironies in the movie’s coda, as if they themselves are taking pity on the viewer. As executed, it feels like waffling.
This director’s filmography has long been bumpy — he came out of the gate with “Pelle the Conqueror,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1988, took another Palme in 1992 with “The Best Intentions” (working from a script by Ingmar Bergman), and took a notable wrong turn with “Smilla’s Sense of Snow” (1997). And despite the best efforts of the cast and technical crew here, “The Kiss” winds up in the land of “meh.”
The Kiss
Not rated. In Danish with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters.
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