Have You Seen It?

Country of Origin: Denmark. Presented by Jalabert Production and M&M Productions. Written and directed by Lasse Lyskjaer Noer. Produced by Christian Norlyk and Kim Magnusson. Starring Leif Andree (Karl) and Jens Jorn Spottag (Torben). Released in the United States of America in 2023. Running time: 24 minutes.

Knight of Fortune is a film about grief. Although it is true to that experience, it also has a rich sense of humor that exists within the limits of grief.

The film’s main character is a quiet man named Karl . He goes to view his deceased wife’s body at “the chapel”, a morgue with coffins. He has no friends and no family. When left alone with her body, he cannot bring himself to open the coffin’s lid to view her. He adjourns to the men’s room into one of the stalls to get a hold on his emotions. There is a knock on the wall of the neighboring stall and a man asks,”Could you hand me some toilet paper? I’ve run out.” This introduces us to Torben, who has a more forward personality than Karl.

Knight of Fortune is honest in its portrayal of grief as an insular and isolating experience but it also creates sincere laughter. The laughter is never for laughter’s sake. It comes from somewhere deeper: from within the emotional boundaries of grief. It is also a fittingly melancholic, surprisingly life-affirming movie about death and those people left behind to mourn.

The actors, especially the two leads played by Leif Andree (Karl) and Jens Jorn Spottag (Torben), give performances that are great and unadorned. There is no screen of apparent artificiality between us and the characters they play. As a result, we feel an immediate empathetic connection to them. When we first see Karl, we can look in his eyes and feel what he is experiencing. Their characters exist in my mind not as traditional movie characters but as convincing portrayals of the real thing.

The writer and director of the film is Lasse Lyskjaer Noer. What he has created is a film of stark differences: death and life, mourning and humor, the insular and the social, the melancholic and the life-affirming. Noer’s writing and directing abilities can move from powerful emotion to humor with grace when logically I would expect this to be jarring, such as the scene in the men’s room. In his hands, these obvious differences act instead as natural counterparts in a film of beautiful harmonies.

Knight of Fortune was nominated for the best live-action short film Oscar. Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar took home the award and is an expensively-produced, all-star, and innovative film (and worth a look). Of the two, however, Knight of Fortune is the one I’ll be enthusiastically telling people about. Although it has no A-list actors, no star director, and was shot on a much lower budget, it relates to an experience we’ve all had and reaches much, much deeper. It does it with great performances and confidently graceful writing and direction. With honest emotion and rich humor, Knight of Fortune is beautiful.

[Currently available for viewing on YouTube.com]