Denmark, 1913: a young cavalry officer in training finds his sense of duty tested the moment he meets a baron's daughter confined to a wheelchair after an accident.
What is The Kiss about?
Anton is focused on one thing, finishing his training as a cavalry officer, when a routine exercise puts his platoon at the service of Baron von Løvenskjold. What starts as a simple favor turns into an invitation to a ball at the baron's castle, and there Anton meets Edith, the baron's daughter, whose life changed after an accident left her in a wheelchair. Directed by Bille August, The Kiss builds its romance across the gap between Anton's discipline and duty and Edith's world of old wealth and inherited expectation, with the shadow of the coming war sitting just off to the side of their story. Esben Smed plays Anton and Clara Rosager plays Edith, with Lars Mikkelsen, Rosalinde Mynster, David Dencik, Kurt Dreyer, Klaus Tilsted Søndergaard and Henrik Blauner Clausen filling out the household and social world around them.
About the cast
Smed carries the film as a young officer whose sense of obligation keeps colliding with what he actually wants, opposite Rosager as a young woman whose circumstances have narrowed the choices available to her far more than her position suggests. Mikkelsen and Dencik anchor much of the older generation's presence, with Mynster, Dreyer, Søndergaard and Clausen rounding out the estate's world.
Context & significance
Set in Denmark in the years just before the First World War, the film uses its 1913 setting to frame a class divide that the romance keeps running up against, between a career built on service and a household built on inheritance. At close to two hours, it gives the period setting, and the manners that come with it, room to sit alongside the central relationship rather than rushing past it.
Watching The Kiss on Ktime
The Kiss is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so the period drama plays fully in Farsi from start to finish. Watching only requires a free K-Time account login, and the Farsi-language interface makes it simple for Persian-speaking viewers to find period dramas like this one in the wider catalogue.