While a series of successful Scandinavian crime writers with film
versions of their bestsellers are shuffling into position at Cannes,
Danish film is also represented with a large-scale production of the
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez' novel "Memories of my Melancholy Whores".
Henning Carlsen directed the Spanish-language, Mexican-Danish
coproduction, filmed in Mexico with a budget of 3.8 million euros.
The idea for the film came about when Henning Carlsen, shortly
after the publication in Denmark of the much-praised Marquez novel, felt
inspired by the story of a man who finds love late in life. He did not
at first have a film in mind but the narrative and its similarities with
Knut Hamsun's "Hunger" which Henning Carlsen, to great acclaim, turned
into a film in 1966, intrigued and encouraged him to tackle the story.
As he explains in the director's statement that accompanies the
film at Cannes, both novels have as their jumping-off point
intellectual, slightly mad writers who fall in love with women outside
their normal spheres. An idea of how to change the structure of the
novel persuaded him to transpose the sensual tale to film with the help
of renowned French scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who in 1986 wrote
the script for Henning Carlsen's "Oviri" about the painter Paul Gauguin,
and who, during his long career, among other screenplays co-wrote
"Valmont" with Milos Forman and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" with
Philip Kaufman.
"Memories of my Melancholy Whores" had its first international
screening at the Cannes market. The Danish producer Nina Crone was
happy, finally, to be able to present the film to an international
audience after a long and laborious genesis. Along the way filming was
delayed by, among other things, an anti-prostitution group whose
criticism of the production, three weeks prior to the planned start of
principal photography, caused the original financing to fall apart.
According to Nina Crone, filming, once under way, went well, and
she was generally impressed by the level of expertise of the Mexican
crew, all of whom had a great deal of prior experience working with both
local and American productions.
Besides the director Henning Carlsen, other Danes involved with
the production include film editor Anders Refn, and sound editor Eddie
Simonsen. The cast includes Emilio EchevarrÃa, known for his role as El
Chivo in Alejandro González Iñárritus breakthrough film "Amores Perros",
as the 90-year-old El Sabio, Geraldine Chaplin, Ãngela Molina, and
features the debut of Paola Medina as the young girl.