A Soap (En Soap) (2005)
Average Rating: 5.5/10
Reviews Counted: 11
Fresh: 6 | Rotten: 5
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 5.6/10
Critic Reviews: 6
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 2
No consensus yet.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.6/5
User Ratings: 1,634
My Rating
Movie Info
A dejected beauty salon owner enters into a tenuous friendship with her shy, pre-operative transsexual neighbor in director Pernille Fischer Christensen's simmering tale of affection and compassion. Thirty-two year old Charlotte (Trine Dyrholm) may own a successful beauty salon, but her failing relationship with increasingly unstable live-in boyfriend Kristian (Frank Thiel) has found her opting to strike out on her own for a change. As Charlotte embarks on a series of strictly sexual one-night
Nov 3, 2006 Wide
Feb 6, 2007
Strand Releasing
Watch It Now
Cast
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Trine Dyrholm
Charlotte -
David Dencik
Veronica -
Frank Thiel
Kristian -
Elsebeth Steentoft
Veronica's Mother -
Christian Tafdrup
Customer -
Jacob Lohmann
One-Night Stand -
Pauli Ryberg
Customer -
Claes Bang
One-Night Stand -
-
-
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All Critics (12) | Top Critics (6) | Fresh (6) | Rotten (5) | DVD (1)
Fear of Flying never got made into a movie. But imagine a 21st century version transported to Denmark with a transsexual thrown in for added titillation, and you've got the gist of the amusing melodrama Soap.
Top CriticAnother week, another movie about a depressed transsexual hooker.
... the film is an anti-soap opera in the trappings of an old- fashioned sudsfest.
The idea that these characters are willing to fight like cats and dogs, and destroy each other and themselves, to avoid confronting their intense attraction to each other is totally convincing.
[The film takes] some of its cues from the soaps and melodramas the characters watch together and others from a realist tradition of considerable emotional heft.
The movie strands you in two miserable flats with these cliche-ridden characters and a static love story that is as predictable as it is pedestrian.
While I might want to applaud Fischer Christensen for attempting to say something pertinent about gender roles and stereotypes, there is something curiously lacking in the characters.
Director Pernille Fischer Christensen is striving, I suspect, for a quiet seriousness and a respectful approach to transsexualism, but there's a point beyond which quiet seriousness becomes too-staid solemnity.
A smart and assured spin on traditional soap-opera tropes.
En soap never becomes too soapy, though the film does remain a bit mechanical and predictable at times, despite its rare insight in its subject matter.
Christensen joylessly scrubs A Soap clean of sudsy silliness until all that remains is Von Trier-ian starkness.
Audience Reviews for A Soap (En Soap)
Super Reviewer
[font=Century Gothic][/font]
[font=Century Gothic]"Soap" is an adequate character study of two people who are not happy with who they are and do not know what they want out of life. Veronica may say she wants an operation but her masculine appearance does not show much commitment to her hormone regimen while her overdose speaks of deeper issues than just gender. Speaking of a lack of commitment, there is Charlotte, who is the poster child, simply by trying to have sex with every man in Scandinavia. For a bourgeois relationship, her four years with Kristian is a little unusual in that it had gone on for so long without them getting married.[/font]
Super Reviewer
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