The Gentle Pain

One cant help wondering whether some quartercentury ago Carsten Brandt had the slightest inkling of the epic dimension the project he was then starting to conceive The Gentle Pain would take on in the subsequent decades For it became epic in just about every sense of the word the film is very long it tells a multilayered story characterised as much by its digressions as by its main narrative thread which concerns a filmmakers attempts to make sense of the life of Thorkild Hansen a Danish travellerhistorianwriter internationally probably best known for his nonfiction novel Processen mod Hamsun 1978 and it took a long time to finish and then sat on a shelf due to legal battles galore What is now finally revealed is a monument of modernist cinema a work that as much charts one mans journey into his soul as a voyage of discovery into another artists mind