The Man Who Would Live Forever

Running time: N/A

A remote part of the country, an isolated farm, a woman with an unrequited passion, and a man on the verge of insanity Torben Skjodt Jensen's debut black & white feature is a rare visual experience. One breathtakingly beautiful suite of images succeeds another in a hypnotic rhythm reminiscent of Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. The man of the title, Adrian Palmberg, lives to be a hundred, and the film follows him to his miraculous end. As a young man, he turns against his pastor father's faith and takes up farming, but when his farm burns down and his wife and son die in the flames, he takes leave of his senses, and for long periods he locks himself away in a cage. He regards himself as immortal; after all, is he not already dead? In the somberness of subject and the asceticism of the set, Torben Skjodt Jensen, familiar for his much praised documentary on Carl Theodor Dreyer, has drawn inspiration from the master; and he too, is by no means averse to the supernatural. But the tone and style of The Man Who Would Live Forever alternates between gallows humor and melodrama, and Torben Skjodt Jensen dauntlessly applies the entire arsenal of effects. The virtuoso light-graded cinematography is the work of the Norwegian, Harald Paalgard