André Palacios Tingberg | Copenhagen Rendezvous / 2023

escape to the real world

by Douglas Messerli

 

André Palacios Tingberg (screenwriter and director) Copenhagen Rendezvous / 2023 [3 minutes]

 

I have to admit that I’m beginning to dislike the increasing numbers of short gay films which have ditched all dialogue for what, as this film describes it, is an “Emotionally charged” and “vivid tapestry of memories” as opposed of helping us learn linguistically—which is the primary why we make meaning—what isn’t visually on the surface of things. Film relies obviously on the image, but the wonderful thing about a full cinematic experience is its incorporation of narrative techniques within language, music, and image, each enriching the other as it does in the sound-focused world of opera.

     Take away words in either case and we immediately realize something is missing from the full experience, and in the case of relying just on image I find that directors often feel they need to simplify and universalize their images so significantly that they often become cliches of experience rather than full expressions of a confusing and disorderly universe.

     When viewing Copenhagen Rendezvous I kept thinking of another film, The Memory of You (2015) located in another Scandinavian capital, Stockholm. Just as the two men on the Copenhagen escalator (Jonas Kajberg and Nicklas Bøhm), one going up, the other down, the two Swedes of Memory who run into each other at an art opening across the street from a restaurant where one of them was about to dine, have had an intense relationship. While in Copenhagen it was a one night fling replete with drinks in a bar, followed by a few karaoke songs, dinner in a cozy restaurant, dancing in a romantically-lit apartment room, and finally intense sex, the Swedish couple evidently had a long term relationship memorialized in one of the men’s paintings being shown at the small gallery.

      In Copenhagen all their memories take place in a matter of a few seconds (the film is only 3 minutes in length), while the brief conversation in the Swedish art gallery takes the men into a far more tense interaction, particularly when we discover that the artist would like to renew his relationship with the other man, and that their love for each other has never been fully resolved.

     In Copenhagen it was simply a good night on the town, while in Stockholm it was a full, if failed commitment to love told to us in 14 minutes.

     If we are rather startled to discover that one of the handsome Danish men is actually riding that escalator next to his pregnant wife, meaning that the two boys’ night on the town was simply an act of mendacity to both the woman and the other man, which quickly wipes away any pleasant feelings we have about the gay affair we may have shared with the lovers, in Stockholm we learn that a far more complex series of events have transpired before one of the men, seeking a way out of the gay relationship entered a heterosexual marriage with a woman patiently waiting in the restaurant for her husband to return with his “forgotten wallet.”

     Both men have presumably lied, not only to their mates but to themselves, pretending that being gay is something like a choice which you can simply turn off and on through will. Yet, knowing nothing about the Danish cheater except that he had a good night on the town, we immediately dislike him and feel negative about what a moment before appeared to have been joyous.

     As the one of the Letterboxed commentators, with the moniker of Icarus, expressed his/her feelings: “I had no expectations for this, but that ending was totally not what I could've expected. I was like, ‘Oh. Oh...’” Another amateur viewer put it, “The end gagged me real bad.”

     In Sweden, on the other hand, given the men’s intense attempts to express what was actually behind their separation, we at least give the man with the waiting companion a fair hearing, and we sense his fears of what he has to face when he quickly slips back into “normalcy” at the restaurant table with his wife.

     If we don’t quite know the whole story about the two Swedes, we at least perceive it as a believable story about their very human struggles to move on without each other, while the Danes, rushing around in their one afternoon and evening together—where inexplicably they even found time to visit a laundromat—is simply a bad joke, a misunderstanding.

     If we feel any emotional involvement regarding Tingberg’s Copenhagen Rendezvous it is in simply sharing the good fortune of the man returning to street level reality. If the other is going up, we recognize it won’t not be for long and his memories of his glory days will be all his has as he faces fatherhood and a marriage in which there are certain to be problems regarding his hidden sexuality, unless he has already admitted to bisexuality, something we would need words to express.

     The punch of irony is all the primarily visual experience can offer, while the one combining images and language presents us with a far more complex vision of the failure to accept his gay sexuality.

 

Los Angeles, November 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).