Movie Review SSJ

On Christian Tafdrup’s “Back to the First Love” as Liquid Mythology

The rain falls like shattered amphorae over Copenhagen, drenching not just concrete but cosmic order. In Tafdrup’s aqueous psychodrama, the Delphic oracle’s curse manifests as plumbing leaks – where Sophocles gave us parricide and incest, this Danish Oedipus offers damp walls and middle-aged nostalgia. The true tragedy? Not that a mother desires her son, but that Time’s current flows backward like Lethe’s forbidden stream.

Liquid Chronos

Water becomes the film’s alchemical solvent:

• Torrential downpour dissolving wrinkles like parchment
• Seeping drips reconstituting age spots into freckles
• Shower streams baptizing sagging flesh into taut mortality

This isn’t mere weather, but the elemental syntax of Nordic melancholy. When the couple’s youth resurfaces, notice how their apartment floods – not with Eros, but with the brackish water of memory. The director constructs a hydraulic model of time where:
Youth = Torrent
Age = Evaporation
Regret = Condensation

Their transient rejuvenation carries the metallic taste of Oslo fjords in November – beautiful, lethal, heavy with unshed myths.

The Thermodynamics of Desire
The mother’s attraction to her son violates not social codes, but entropy’s law. Tafdrup visualizes this through thermodynamic metaphors:

1. Phase Transition : Menopausal body → Nubile form (solid → liquid)
2. Combustion : Incestuous gaze igniting family structure (activation energy)
3. Entropy : Leaking apartment as disordered system

When the mother proposes conceiving with her son, she attempts biological perpetual motion – a womb-powered time machine. But like Icarus’ waxen wings, their stolen youth melts under reality’s sun.

Fractured Oracles
The film’s limitation lies not in its Oedipal audacity, but in its Apollonian restraint. Where Bergman would have dissected family psychopathology with surgical precision, Tafdrup settles for:

• Father’s perspective as sole narrative prism
• Rejuvenation sequences shot like IKEA commercials
• Climactic return to normalcy as emotional cop-out

The true tragedy remains unspoken: In Nordic cosmology, the World Tree Yggdrasil roots itself in three springs – none grant the power to re-drink spent years. When the couple’s apartment stops leaking, it’s not resolution, but spiritual dehydration.

Postscript: The Iceberg Principle
What surfaces as incestuous desire is merely the visible 1/8th of Tafdrup’s thematic iceberg. Beneath lies:

• Viking fear of Ragnarök (aging as apocalypse)
• Kierkegaardian dread of temporal existence
• Nordic welfare state’s crisis of purpose

The final shot of placid old age isn’t harmony, but frostbite of the soul – the couple now permanently shipwrecked between chronological time and kairotic moments, their longing preserved like prehistoric insects in Scandinavian amber.