Was Mette having an extramarital affair with Frank, or am I getting the women at the dinner party confused? Was it not she that exited the hotel room with Frank. They then had a more realistic, FWB, approach to sex, where the husband was a fool for love, as Frank points out later.
sharephooey, i was hoping someone had answered your questions as I had the very same questions!it's so easy to get confused between all those thin blondes.
btw, you should add SPOiLERS to your heading.
Ad hoc, Ad loc, Quid pro queeee,
So little time and so much to see
I'm pretty sure the wife was having the affair.
1) Frank says in the autopsy room that he would love to be with Mette if Jonas didn't want to.
2) Mette says at the end that she misses Frank and gets rather emotional about it.
3) I'm pretty positive that while watching it I could tell it was Mette.
The only thing that bugs me is how ticked she gets about finding the panties when she's having an affair too. But to be honest, the structure of the film goes so all over the place that maybe she started the affair later. Just a thought.
Either way, I loved this movie.
I suppose it's interpretive, but I don't think she was having an affair and I don't think we were supposed to think she was :) I think Frank was attracted to Mette and while drunk (at the dinner party) made some advances on her. Mette, realizing he was just drunk and not wanting to make something out of nothing, politely evaded his advances.
I think that's all there was to it. Frank was probably encouraged to make his advances by the fact that Jonas was already cheating on Mette, but I'm pretty sure Mette was not unfaithful.
This was pretty much what I thought. I think Frank and Mette were definitely interested in each other but didn't get to the point of having an affair. They seemed to get closer while she was being neglected, which would certainly merit her emotional reaction at the end. I may have missed some obvious evidence to the contrary, though.
shareYes definetely she was having the affair. Maybe that's why the husband 'wasn't getting enough' in the first place or it could be that she started to have the affair AFTERWARDS, once he started seeing Julia.
shareNo affair.
shareYes definetely she was having the affair.
The only thing that bugs me is how ticked she gets about finding the panties when she's having an affair too.Thats the reason why she can't be
When Jonas stops paying attention to Mette, Frank starts an affair with Mette. Frank, being Jonas' best friend, is even more loathsome because he knows that Jonas is falling in love with Julia and so he takes the opportunity to seduce Mette who is already in an emotionally fragile state. Who's to say that Frank didn't plant the original seed of doubt in Mette's mind, whispering to her about Jonas' suspicious absences.
The scene with Mette and Frank can easily be dismissed as Jonas' fantasy after Frank asks him to switch Mette for Julia. However, Mette's own admission comes when she and Jonas are trying to reconcile and she moans "I miss Frank!" Without the context of an affair, her comment would be nonsense.
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I ain't your friend, palooka.
hmm don't think anyone is really hitting the nail on the head here.
for me, it seems clear than we can assume:
jonas has an affair and goes awol.
mette is distraught.
frank, jonas' best mate and long-time friend of mette, comforts her.
they get drunk
they sleep together once.
Jonas is gone for a long time and Mette has no reason to believe he will ever return to her. It seems illogical that, given Frank's attraction to Mette and Mette's vulnerable state, that they slept together only once. It's far more likely that they continued their own affair in Jonas' absence.
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I ain't your friend, palooka.
Mette did not cheat on Jonas before he left her for Julia. Frank made some sexual advances on Mette after the dinner party but she showed him the door (politely).
The rest is open to interpretation. I assumed Frank and Mette may have had sexual relations once Jonas left, after all Frank did say he would take Mette if Jonas didn't want her.
When did I ever claim that Mette and Frank had an affair before Jonas left her for Julia? My point is that, after Jonas leaves, Frank comforts Mette and the two begin a relationship since her marriage is all but over.
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I ain't your friend, palooka.
^ agreed
shareDisagree with the "nonsense" remark. It works even better if there was no affair.
Here is why IMO: In Danish she says she misses Frank because he was true to his madness... in other words; Frank was true to his own self, he was dependable, a little mad but at least one would know this. Something you could not say about Jonas. He wanted to fly around the world and not taking pictures of dead people. Jonas acted like someone else throughout most of the movie if not all the movie. So by saying she misses frank, she actually says she needs some trust and stability... Also supported to the next sentence about if he wanted to see the children; we all know children needs stability and cry for responsibility. Jonas would never be stable and dependable and clearly not responsible. I think his old and unsafe car was an example of this. In short, he was untrue to everything around him including himself - even in death. Unlike Frank – though a far cry from ideal, still preferred. As she says; he was true to his madness. And this is why she says "I miss Frank", she might as well have said "i miss what I thought you once were".
In other words, it does not matter if Mette has an affair or not. And if it doesn't matter to the plot or the story, it usually means it did not happen.
I don't speak Danish and I read the subtitles in English, so, whether or not the comment is "I miss Frank" or "I miss Frank because he was true to his madness", I really can't say. However, I believe in Occram's Razor - the simplest explanation is more likely to be correct (expressed simply: when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras). Therefore, if she's mentioning Frank at all, it's most likely due to the fact that he was attracted to her, she was newly separated, and he comforted her in her time of vulnerability. When Jonas was becoming obsessed with the other woman, he paid little attention to Mete and it makes sense that she would cling to whomever showed her attention. Your theory is good, but it reads a little too much into the situation and ignores human nature.
And, if she did have an affair as I'm postulating, it does matter to the plot because it strains his return even more as Mete doesn't really need to take him back.
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I ain't your friend, palooka.
Why do people try to imagine things that wasn't even showed in the movie and doesn't even add anything to plot? The situation is quite clear, Frank made some sexual advances on Mette after the dinner party but she showed him the door. Nothing more to add to that situation.
shareIf you read any of my previous comments, I've explained why it's important to the plot and why it's not really imagined. Please read my previous comments and, if you have these same questions, I will try to clarify.
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I ain't your friend, palooka.
Mette is missing Frank, because he was murdered.
People only being allowed to miss dead friends whom they had sexual relationships with is a quite far-fetched idea and, I daresay, the exact opposite of Ockham's Razor.
Mentioning a dead friend while attempting to reconcile with an estranged husband is strange to say the least. It doesn't make sense. Frank wasn't a parent or a kid or a confidante so, in your scenario, she mentions a dead friend completely out of context.
Jonas wants to belong to Julia's world, but he doesn't because he can't - he's not in their league and he now knows it.
Mette may be plain in comparison to Julia, but she was Frank's first choice and he let her know it. Jonas is settling for Mette. Mette knows he's settling, but she also knows he's trying to make it work, but that doesn't lessen the pain of knowing she wasn't her husband's first choice. Even if she and Frank weren't lovers, they had to have had a significant courtship in Jonas' absence.
The English subtitles are (written down, not from the memory):
- I am really sorry. I don't know how it got to be such a mess. It just happened. The earth vanished beneath my feet. I'm not moaning. But I landed very hard.
- You always did dream of flying.
- Yes. Who doesn't?
At this moment Mette sobs and says:
- I miss Frank. Maybe he was mad, but you could see his madness.
- Yes.
They're talking about the mess he's gotten them both into. A mutual friend who got murdered (and not some random dead guy) as a direct consequence of this mess is hardly out of context.
Well, but if you still think otherwise, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.
@jt-294 I agree with you she liked him after getting to know him but it did not show anything of her sleeping with him. I am always amazed how viewers have characters sleeping with one another when the film does not indicate it. The main reason why I don't believe it happened is that it is not her personality to do this. Just look how it made her feel, people don't change on something this significant he was the best friend and anytime someone gets hit on by someone drunk it usually becomes very offensive to woman. And they rarely get back to the mood of sleeping with you. He was out of line the way he went after her. And most women don't forget that. He was comfort, that being said lets give the woman some credit that she meant he was good in his own way but did not mean she wanted to sleep with him. In fact with what she was going through I think it was the last thing on her mind. She saw frank's bad side too, and his disloyalty after getting out from under Jonas what would she even want him around for after she gets her self together. Too much of a reminder.
shareBeing myself a woman and knowing many, many other women, I can't begin to tell you how wrong your characterization of women is. Yeah, there are women out there who would behave like you described and would be completely turned off by a drunken advance. There are so many more that would file that information away for a rainy day and would use it out of spite. Mette is supposed to be a common woman - she's what someone like Jonas can hope to attain while Julia is the sparkly goal that's just out of reach. Being a common woman, the workhorse wife, making her uncommonly loyal despite his infidelity doesn't seem true to her character. There's a reason why the phrase "the best way over one man is under another" exists.
share