All About Anna (2005)

wants him back or wants revenge for ever needing him, she escapes into work, accepting a costume-design job at a Paris theatre. There she becomes entangled in the bitter emotional fallout between director Pierre and actress Sophie, and her friendship with Sophie develops into an intimate encounter that is gentler and more revealing than Anna expects. Meanwhile, the people left behind in Copenhagen start crossing boundaries of their own. Director Jessica Nilsson aims for a female-centred erotic drama in which desire is treated as part of character rather than a detachable porn intermission. The ambition is admirable, even if the dialogue can be clunky, the performances uneven and the romantic psychology thinner than the film imagines. What works is Anna’s gradual recognition that casual sex has become less a declaration of freedom than a hiding place. The story ultimately circles the awkward truth she has spent years dodging: avoiding love does not prevent pain; it merely gives the pain a stylish apartment and permission to sleep around.

This is unmistakably a product of early-2000s European sexual candour, arriving in the same general climate as films that tried to drag unsimulated sex out of the porn shop and into relationship drama. Produced through Denmark’s Zentropa orbit, it wears its “sex film for women” intentions openly, mixing glossy romance, frank nudity and a streak of Scandinavian emotional coolness. Much of its personality comes from downtown Copenhagen, including Anna’s airy apartment—actually Gry Bay’s own home—with its enormous windows, urban light and conspicuous lack of privacy. The Paris theatre chapter adds rehearsal rooms, costumes and café-style sophistication, giving Anna’s emotional flight a suitably bohemian change of scenery. The overall vibe is less sleazy midnight grindhouse than an extended, very naked episode of Sex and the City made by Danes: playful in places, melancholy underneath, occasionally awkward, but sincere about the difference between getting laid and letting somebody matter.

Gry Bay carries the film with a mix of Nordic freshness, wary intelligence and unforced sensuality; Anna can be selfish and maddening, but Bay makes her fear of abandonment feel more convincing than some of the script’s speeches. She is striking without being presented as an untouchable glamour doll, and her relaxed physical confidence gives the bedroom scenes their heat. Eileen Daly supplies the brasher, wickedly amused sexuality as Camilla, while French adult-film star Ovidie brings Sophie a softer, more knowing allure. The film is genuinely explicit: there is full-frontal nudity, oral sex and unsimulated intercourse rather than strategic sheets and tasteful camera swerves. Yet it is photographed as erotic relationship cinema, not a mechanical parade of close-ups. Bodies are certainly on display, but the real indecency, as Anna learns, is allowing someone to see what is going on inside her.

Anna is a young girl in Copenhagen in love with Johan. This film shows the roller-coaster ride of their relationship and a lot of good sex.