Screened at the Berlin International Film Festival

BERLIN - In "A Soap," the characters watch American soap operas and you envy them because the movie you're watching is appallingly dreary. This two-hander is about a sometimes awkward, sometimes compassionate relationship between a self-loathing transsexual and her downstairs neighbor, a confused woman looking for love in all the wrong places. The movie strands you in two miserable flats with these cliche-ridden characters and a static love story that is as predictable as it is pedestrian. Unaccountably selected for competition at the Berlin Film Festival, "A Soap" is not likely to travel far from its native Denmark.

Trine Dyrholm plays Charlotte, a thirty-something blonde who moves out of her doctor-boyfriend's place for vague reasons. When she knocks on a neighbor's door for help in moving a bed, she meets Veronica (David Dencik), a man transitioning to a woman only Veronica can seem to make the wigs and clothes work for her.

The two don't get along well at first, but Veronica's suicide attempt a few nights later does bring them closer together. Each still maintains a wary distance, however.

Men shuffle in and out of both flats, as sex customers for Veronica and unsatisfying one-night stands for Charlotte. Charlotte's ex (Frank Thiel) shows up every so often to plead/berate for her return. She must get some kick out of it because she always lets him in. One night he drunkenly smacks her so Veronica hurries downstairs to smack him back. That's what girlfriends are for.

These two characters are in such dead-end, depressing situations they are clearly meant for each other in a way that only a truly bad movie will allow.

Pernille Fischer Christensen's repetitive, unenlightening direction of Kim Fupz Aakeson's tissue-thin script brings the pace down to a crawl. Then every so often the movie stops for a narrator to go back over a few details that perhaps got lost in the shuffle.

Cinematographer Erik Molberg Hansen's harsh lighting flatters no actor. Rasmus Thjellesen's sets all too successfully reflect the dreariness of these forlorn lives.