The Wild Duck

Is The Wild Duck an example of filmed theatre? The expression itself tends to raise the alarm of cinephilia. However, in this case, the term bears another meaning, far different from clichés describing soulless films adapted from prestigious plays as if the original’s excellence concealed the adaptation’s lack of imagination. The Wild Duck, the feature debut of the young Swedish cineast, Nadja Ericsson, is indeed an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s leading play The Wild Duck (1884). This is its only similarity with more academic and less daring cinema. On the one hand, the reputed adaptation only brings some elements introduced by the Norwegian playwright, for which the buried conflicts presented in the original play now arise to the surface, wrapped in an anachronic, minimalist and mysterious aura. On the other hand, Nadja Ericsson adopts filmmaking and editing styles that could appear as amateurish, while it instead reveal accurately the vulnerability of characters, who are trapped in a dense thread of secrets and loyalties. The cineast manages to narrate the breakdown of a family nucleus and to reflect on lost illusions. And therefore, she uses minimum elements with a poetry of fragility and weakness, filled with restless images, scattered dialogues and crackling sounds. Can we say then that The Wild Duck is an example of filmed theatre? If anything, it is a film about a stage play, but we have here something much more transcendent: real Cinema. GABRIEL DOMÉNECH