Drama. R. 1 hour, 25 minutes. At the United Artists Greenwood Plaza.
Danish director Martin Pieter Zandvliet trains an unforgiving eye on the dark journey of recovery in “Applause,” the lens so close to star Paprika Steen’s face that the woes of a lifetime can be charted in pockmarks and ridges.
Steen is one of Denmark’s leading lights, probably best known here as the daughter in a destructing family in “The Celebration,” a Jury Prize winner at Cannes in 1998. In “Applause,” Zandvliet and Steen create an unvarnished saga of a recovering alcoholic whose acting career makes all that teetering on the edge of one-day-at-a-time very public. It is a singular performance and a deeply affecting if imperfect film.
The centerpiece is Steen, unflinchingly real as Thea — newly sober, trying out an unsedated existence and hoping to reclaim custody of her young sons.
Everywhere Thea turns, she is surrounded by the debris of her past.
The wounded children, afraid to trust a mother who loves them passionately but lets them down. The ex (a superb Michael Falch, who, like Steen, bares soul and scars), wearing his frustrations like a shroud.
“Applause” leaves you curious to see what this promising filmmaker will do next.
