If you find yourself laughing at the most inappropriate times, Knight of Fortune will be right up your alley. Sometimes an unexpected emotion or trauma can be so overwhelming, that we are surprised by our own laughter. Comedy can be a massive tension reliever, and, in his directorial debut, Lasse Lyskjær Noer leans into the absurdity of a tale of grief and unexpected friendship. It’s one of the most uniquely human stories of the year.
**We talk about the entirety of Knight of Fortune and the arc of its themes. We have linked the film below. Please consider watching it and then scrolling back up to read our conversation.**
Fortune centers on Karl Bergström, a man reluctant to face the death of his wife. When a broken light in the morgue distracts him from opening her casket to say goodbye, we realize that Karl isn’t ready to confront such emotion. Are some things funnier when we experience them during a troubled time? For Noer, we could all use a little more absurdity.
“I’m often awkward, so it’s part of me,” Noer admits. “When it comes to grieving and loss, there is a divinity when you laugh. Laughter and grief live very close to one another. It liberates you when you are in pain, I think, when someone tells you a joke. You forget about the pain for two or three seconds. It’s how I write, but it’s a way to protect yourself from that grief.”
“I always remember going back to when we started having films going all the way to the Oscars,” producer Kim Magnussen says “People will ask me things, ‘What’s the best way to get a movie this far’ and I always say that if you can tell a story with humor or with a version of humor, people will respond to it. It’s an easier task to alleviate people with humor, and it warms up people. It helps people understand a message more in a way where you don’t have to be on the dark side. You can smile and laugh but still get the important message. Great films with great subject matter told with humor [is something] I’m all for. Knight of Fortune goes even further with its morbidity–I’m all in.”
The morgue is a sterile environment–it lacks the comfort of a funeral home–and it carries an eerie, almost green hue to it. It reminds you of embalming fluid or the color of a surgeon’s smock. In the center of almost every room, though, is the presence of a stone-white casket. It’s an odd atmosphere, to be sure, and one that lends itself to something dark and a bit funny.
“It was important to me that the morgue had a sterile feel to it, and it had to have this green-ish vibe to it,” he says. “It had to be claustrophobic, because I wanted people to feel like they had to get out. I wanted the only thing that brought warmth and love were the people in it. We only have one scene where we get pulled out of this bubble, and that was key to showing the difference between the real world outside. You can see the people walking around outside, so you know that life goes on. It feels like a timepiece at the beginning since we are stuck in this one place.”
In one of the most amusing moments, a family walks into the morgue and forms a circle at the edges of the room. It makes the viewer squirm and bolt towards the door. Much like the larger motifs at hand, it’s a moment of personal confrontation even if the moment will make the characters laugh when they look back on it.
“If we look at the image of Torben in the center of the circle, I wanted him to feel very captured,” Noer says. “I had to put him in there with people around him, and Leif Andrée is such a great actor. His character is such a polite guy but he’s primitive in some way since he wants to fix a lamp instead of deal with the death of his wife. He doesn’t just want to walk out of the room, and he stays since that’s the nicest thing to do. It was important to me to give him layers, so he wouldn’t just storm out–that’s a natural response. By this point, he’s built a relationship, but he has no idea what the fuck is going on. A part of him wants to stay.”
Karl and Torben meet, in all places, in the men’s room. Torben is crying in the stall next to Karl, and he requests a piece of toilet paper to dry his face–Torben’s hand snaking under the stall wall without any hesitation. If you can bond with another person while crying in a morgue’s public restroom, isn’t that someone that you can call a friend for life? In one of the few moments outside, the two men share a moment on a bench with a box of ashes between them. Torben is sitting back–a bit more relaxed–while Karl leans forward. Their body language even suggests different phases of accepting death.
“I wanted to start out in a master, and this is, to me, a forgiveness scene between them,” he says. “As Torben starts laugh, he’s very relaxed. Karl is still protecting himself more, so he still has his guard up. It starts to fall away as Torben starts laughing. They’ve both been lying to each other, but they know each other’s pain. When Karl admits that he can’t open the casket alone, it’s a pivotal moment for him since he confesses that he needs support.”
It all comes back to laughter, though. Feeling that warmth bubble up inside and escape as a laugh is an almost indescribable thing that makes us human. It doesn’t undercut or devalue grief.
“To laugh together with strangers is something that brings people together,” Magnussen says. “That’s what this film can do.”
“I hope [the Academy] like absurdity,” Noer says, with a big smile.
https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/the-new-yorker-shorts-knight-of-fortune