About a young Iranian man in Denmark looking for a wifely stand-in to solidify his residency, The Charmer is itself a charming film that chooses to reveal all the complexities of this man’s circumstances slowly, shrewdly, one facet at a time. This method of refusing to disclose the full extent of the main character’s circumstances—as for instance its choosing to withhold information about Esmail’s job, and to have as the first scene a panting enigmatic couple and then a suicide—is so shrewd and enjoyable and so pregnant with meaning and anticipation that it was almost inevitable that what followed let me down, tinging me with the sharp and melancholic disappointment…
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Its star a decidedly pudgier character than that of his bravura bad-boy role as a high-school truant, Election finds in Matthew Broderick the perfect hypocrite. And yet every main character in the film exhibits this same hypocrisy, just to different degrees. And so he’s far from alone—he just happens to be helming the ship. Election can sometimes be entertaining, even if this entertaining is that of an over-the-top satire in which repeated excess is the substitute for wit and subtlety. Tracy Flick is an overambitious and snotty-nosed cheater without the slightest hint of self-awareness, just as her civics teacher happens to be an adulterer who gives to his pedophile colleague…
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Opening with a pertinent but in-plain-sight quote from The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen, in whose play a character forbiddingly refers to the dread of letting in the so-called young people, While We’re Young tries to bring to its thematic elements a coherence and a sense of character that should be the preserve of a more textured and multifarious film. This is still the case—While We’re Young tarnishes its lighthearted comedy by pointing up its all-too-important division between youth and age, making of its second half something of a lark highlighting its risible seriousness and how hard it’s trying to make its point. But pointing up its themes is not…
