Erik Clausen's "Villa Paranoia" is a satire, psychological drama and comedy all rolled into one. The favorite film of the general public, actually more important than the jury prize, at the 2005 Rouen, Festival of Nordic Cinema was Erik Clausen's brilliant bittersweet dramatic comedy, "Villa Paranoia", which was also selected by the European Youth Jury indicative of its appeal to cinephiles of all ages. The following day I travelled with director-actor Clausen to the remote French town of Mamers, Pays de Loire, for a provincial festival of new European cinema, where "Villa Paranoia" picked up three more prizes -- Best film, Professional Jury; Best Film, Audience prize; and Best film of another youth jury composed of "lycéens", French high school students. Five prizes in a single weekend -- not a bad haul for a film from a small country with unknown actors. In addition, "Villa" was awarded the Grand Prix, the Maverick Spirit Award, at San Jose, California, just a week ago, by distinguished British actor Sir Ben Kingsley ("Ghandi"), making it a grand total of six prizes in a single week. If Lars van Trier has put Denmark on the offbeat-oddball Dogma Cinematic map in recent years, there is now a good chance that Veteran Maverick Erik Clausen (62) and his capable crew of actors will soon show the world that Denmark has more to offer than dogmatic drivel, In this case a mass audience pleaser for young and old alike. Moreover, the female lead of his film, Sonja Richter, (born 1974) has such a magical screen presence that, with a little more exposure, she stands a good chance of becoming the next international Scandinavian Diva. Sonia was also fantastic in the Susan Blier film "Open Hearts" (Elsker dig for evigt) opposite major Danish star Mads Mikkelsen, at this festival in 2002. For the record, "Villa Paranoia" is a fiction film, written, directed, and acted in by the multi-faceted Mr. Clausen, and employing certain motifs from Molière's "The Imaginary Invalid". PLOT: Anna (Sonia Richter), an ambitious young actress, has lost a deeply coveted role in the Moliére play and reduced to making an utterly stupid TV chicken commercial is on the verge of suicide. However, Jorgen (Clausen) who runs a massive chicken farm sponsoring the TV spot offers her a job with room and board taking care of his cantankerous, senile, wheel-chair ridden father, Walentin, (Frits Helmuth) who has not spoken a word since his wife Stella committed suicide years before. Anna is the only one who eventually finds a way of communicating with the hostile silent old grouch -- and moreover, discovers that he has been faking deafness and immobility all these years -- a living "Malade Imaginaire". This will lead to her playing the greatest role of her own life in order to uncover the dark secret which led to Walentin's total withdrawal from life and reality. Villa "Paradise-Paranoia", true to the Moliere tradition from which it is partially derived, is a heartwarming, multi-layered, serio-comic psycho-drama that literally has something for everybody and only needs proper placement to attain the kind of general international outreach it richly deserves.ALEX, Rouen, March 21, 2005 (Unfortunately, the international promotion VILLA needed was not forthcoming and this remarkable film was lost in the shuffle of unforgettable forgotten films)Alex,Rouen,March 21, 2005

This movie grabbed me with the incredible opening sequence which tricked me into a complete reversal of perspective, so I was hooked by the time the title came on. The theme of this movie is that everyone is acting, trying to re-invent themselves, but not in a tricky way like Identity or the Usual Suspects, but in the way we all try to make whatever banal life we find ourselves in a little more interesting. The scenes in the chicken warehouses are spectacular. At one point Jorgen (who owns the chicken farm) attends a seminar in laughing, where he's the worst student. His discomfort at this lets you see the depth of his yearning to change himself. The movie made me wonder about the hidden mysteries that lie behind the surface of the most commonplace people I see every day. There's not a lot of plot here. Guessing the old man's secret is pretty easy, but the fascination lies in trying to guess what all the other characters will do when they figure it out. This movie appealed to me in the same way that Sideways did, although the characters couldn't be more dissimilar.

As a Dane I'm proud of the handful of good Danish movies that have been produced in recent years. It's a terrible shame, however, that this surge in quality has led the majority of Danish movie critics to lose their sense of criticism. In fact, it has become so bad that I no longer trust any reviews of Danish movies, and as a result I have stopped watching them in theaters.I know it's wrong to hold this unfortunate development against any one movie, so let me stress that "Villa Paranoia" would be a terrible film under any circumstances. The fact that it was hyped by the critics just added fuel to my bonfire of disillusionment with Danish film. Furthermore, waiting until it came out on DVD was very little help against the unshakable feeling of having wasted time and money. Erik Clausen is an accomplished director with a knack for social realism in Copenhagen settings. I particularly enjoyed "De Frigjorte" (1993). As an actor he is usually funny, though he generally plays the same role in all of his movies, namely that of a working-class slob who's down on his luck, partly because he's a slob but mostly because of society, and who redeems himself by doing something good for his community. This is problem number one in "Villa Paranoia"; Clausen casts himself as a chicken farmer, which is such a break from the norm that he never succeeds in making it credible. It is much worse, however, that the film has to make twists and turns and break all rules of how to tell a story to make the audience understand what is going on. For instance, the movie opens with a very sad attempt at visualizing the near-death experience of the main character with the use of low-budget effects and bad camera work. After that, the character tells her best friend that she suddenly felt the urge to throw herself off a bridge. This is symptomatic of the whole movie; there is little or no motivation for the actions of the characters, and Clausen resorts to the lowest form of communicating whatever motivation there is: Telling instead of showing. Thus, at one point, you have a character talking out loud to a purportedly catatonic person about the way he feels, because the script wouldn't allow him to act out his feelings; and later on, voice-over is abruptly introduced, quite possibly as an afterthought, to convey feelings that would otherwise remain unknown to the audience due to the director's ineptitude. Fortunately, at this point you're roughly an hour past caring about any of the characters, let alone the so-called story.The acting, which has frequently been a problem in Clausen's movies, can be summed up in one sad statement: Søren Westerberg Bentsen, whose only other claim to stardom was as a contestant on Big Brother, is no worse than several of the heralded actors in the cast.I give this a 2-out-of-10 rating.

It seems as if filmmakers in Denmark can only one type of film over and over. Isn't this obvious to anyone else? And another thing - if you're going to tell a story like Villa Paranoia, which has been told time and time again, you had better make sure you do it in an original way. Unfortunately it is not. I had to fight to keep my eyes open. Luckily the guy next to me was snoring, so that helped.There isn't even any payoff after sitting through this overlong piece of fiction. The characters are written as boring clichés with minimal and/or predictable arch (if any) and never once do they do or say anything original. The best actor in the film doesn't even speak until 3/4 of the way through. And I can't understand why Eric Clausen would ever choose Søren from Big Brother to play one the main characters. That's right, I said Big Brother, like in the TV show. I mean, come on, aren't there hundreds of educated actors in Denmark who are starving for work? Well, at least it wasn't shot on DV like most Danish films (It was shot on the new Sony IMX). So if nothing else, the picture quality was good and the cinematography was well done. But this was a "wait for video" film for sure. I guess I should have figured that much out when I walked into the theater and immediately noticed I was the only one in there under 60.