DUDE, WHERE'S MY LIFE?

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

A FRACTURED meditation on the life-altering power of love, Danish director Christoffer Boe's award-winning debut feature ``Reconstruction'' is as heart-rendingly immediate as it is intellectually sophisticated.

It looks pretty interesting, too. Shot on Super 16 film stock that was digitally scanned and masked to Cinemascope proportions, the picture has a jumpy, grainy texture that evokes the itchy unsettledness of impulsive passion. And when the film's reality starts crumbling and reforming itself, it's as if the story wasn't recorded on celluloid or video, but with charged, unstable particles.

The one thing ``Reconstruction'' isn't, though, is entirely original. Much of it will be familiar to fans of New Wave-era French Cinema. The film's more modernist Copenhagen locations and naturalized Hollywood glamour images recall ``Alphaville'' vintage Godard, and its plot would fit comfortably into an Alain Resnais retrospective between ``Last Year at Marienbad'' and ``Providence.'' Toss in a key concept from Ingmar Bergman's ``Persona'' playbook, and you've got a European art film of classic dimensions, if perhaps a bit short of classic status.

An off-screen narrator warns us upfront that anything can happen. Which it pretty much does. Basically, Danish photographer Alex (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) picks up Swedish bombshell Aimee (Marie Bonnevie) in a bar, and they head back to her hotel room for the greatest sex of their lives.

How this sits with his longtime girlfriend or her husband, who also happens to be a book author and the narrator we heard earlier, are matters to be dealt with. But more urgent, from Alex's viewpoint anyway, is the fact that his life seems to have been erased on the morning after. His apartment has morphed into an attic storage space (his key won't even fit the lock), while friends, neighbors, father and that girlfriend don't remember having met him.

Further developments, one of which is not revealed (to non-Scandinavian audiences, anyway) until the closing credits, offer tantalizingly imprecise clues as to what might be going on. Has the whole affair occurred in Alex's romantically confused head? Is he just a character in the narrator's book, at the capricious mercy of the author's whim? Or are he and Aimee so destined for each other that God - represented by several GPS-style shots that track the lovers' moves around Copenhagen - has removed all external obstacles to their getting together?

These and other possibilities are fun to contemplate as you're leaving ``Reconstruction.'' That may be an exercise in interpretive gymnastics that filmmakers have run us through before, but Boe and his actors never leave us doubting that we're watching real human beings grappling with their deepest and most confusing desires.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

RECONSTRUCTION - Three stars

(Not rated: sex, language)

Starring: Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Maria Bonnevie, Krister Henriksson.

Director: Christoffer Boe.

Running time: 1 hr. 30 min.

Playing: One Colorado, Pasadena; ArcLight, Hollywood; University 6, Irvine.

In a nutshell: An illicit love affair results in a photographer literally losing the life he once had. Interesting existential puzzle pic owes a lot to mid-20th-century French films. In Danish and Swedish with English subtitles.