The discussion about form-content continues: whether non-plastic art ought to wed what it is about to the way in which it is presented. Christoffer Boe’s aptly titled Reconstruction is an example of technique almost, though not quite, smothering story. The director and, with Mogens Rukov, co-writer’s screenplay is strong and unusual enough that, on the whole, the result succeeds. This is a first feature for the 2001 Danish National Film School graduate, so one can hope he’ll get the stylistic stuff out of his system early and go on from there.

Speaking with youthful enthusiasm about Nouvelle Vague, the liberation of form from “strict restrictions of . . . many years  ago,” “open text [and] self-aware explicit self-referential narrative strategies,” he uses the frame (briefly reverted to internally, as well) of a magician-narrator who cheaply levitates a cigarette while insisting that this “little magic and smoke . . . is all film; reconstruction, but even so, it hurts.”

With story inside of, and alongside, another story that is in turn alongside yet a third, the auteur as novelist-participant spins his tale, fine-tunes his work, pays unspoken homage to Resnais and the mirrors mirroring mirrors of Robbe-Grillet scripts. Accompanying protagonist Alex David (Nikolaj Lie Kass), the viewer finds footing slippery, as superficially distinct characters and situations jockey back-and-forth, reflecting on -- in ways, becoming -- one another.

Alex is a self-centered photographer who records but neither professionally nor personally participates in passion. Distant alike with loving girlfriend Simone and his self-effacing father (Peter Steen), he is uncommitted -- until he sees and snapshots an elegant woman on a metro platform, follows and talks to her in a bar, then shares the night in her Hilton bed. Aimee, it seems, is the dissatisfied and unsatisfied wife of August Holm (Krister Henriksson), famous for writing about passion but who does not understand women and is traveling with her for promotional purposes but keeping himself apart for his work.

Alex must leave in the early morning, bumps into the returning, suspicious husband, and finds that his own life has fled. Thinking to abandon the girlfriend and fly to Rome with this new woman, he greets familiar neighbor Mrs. Banum (Malene Schwartz), but she does not know him; nor do friend Leo and his wife (Nicolas Bro and Helle Fargalid), nor even Simone and his own father, all puzzled but firm; and his apartment is, not empty, but physically disappeared from the building.

Betraying little emotion, possibly hoping that love has transformed his world amidst double-entendre talk of people’s being each other’s dreams, he seeks to re-find worldly, mysterious Aimee. Complicating, and commenting on, the subtext, is that both she and Simone are the Norwegian-Swedish actress Maria Bonnevie, stylish and svelte as the former, brownish with crown-braids as the latter. Aimee speaks Swedish rather than Danish, Simone is Stockholm-born; though different, they are finally as like as Veronica and Betty in the Archie comics.

Will the taciturn young man wind up in Aimee’s arms, or will some fate play dirty with them? Will he declare love for Simone, or will he happily have both females? Or neither? Akin to Thackeray’s Stage Manager/puppetmaster, the illusionist/narrator considers but gives no answer, nor does fabulist/narrator August, busy applying finishing touches to his novel. If these “outside” commentators become too precious, how much more so the cinematography, stark blue-tinted apart from a short scene in red, with heavy newsreel graininess -- three color-revised Super 16 stocks downgraded to video resolution before final digital imaging -- and annoying lettered surveillance overheads that diagram location.

Manuel Alberto Claro’s cinematography is, he says, influenced by still photographers such as J-H Lartigue and Helmut Newton, but, too pretentiously relentless, the camerawork is a distraction. Sans insistent visuals and extra-plot commentary, the story should be intriguing enough to stand alone, and would have been the better for it.

(Released by Palm Pictures; not rated by MPAA.)