Monthly Archives: January 2016

  • In a Better World

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Hævnen

    Susanne Bier (2010)

    In spite of its Golden Globe and Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, In a Better World seems not to have made a big impression outside award ceremonies and the few reviews I read were condescending. It’s not an imaginative film, it’s manipulative and sentimental, yet in the end I liked it a lot. The screenplay, by Susanne Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen, is highly schematic. It’s structured as a series of key actions, the consequences of those actions, and those responsible for them – chiefly the central character Anton (Mikael Persbrandt) – questioning whether their actions were right or at least justifiable, in spite of what they bring about, which is at best complicated and at worst a disaster.

    Anton is a Swedish doctor: we see him both at home in Denmark with his wife (Trine Dyrholm) and two young sons, and at work in a Sudanese refugee camp. The script’s schematism prevails on both continents but it’s hard to reconcile this approach with the chasmal difference between life in Scandinavia and life and death in the camp. Female patients there are abused by a local war lord and his henchmen. When this sadist-tyrant turns up at the camp with a badly injured leg, Anton does his humanitarian duty as a doctor by treating the injury – to the consternation of the refugees. A little later, the war lord is still behaving atrociously and Anton can no longer bear his malignity: he throws the man out of the makeshift hospital, leaving him to a lynch mob of refugees. Back in Denmark, before this latest stint in Africa, Anton has been showing his sons the virtue of turning the other cheek. Anton is struck, on two separate occasions, by a hot-tempered mechanic, whose son was in a playground fight with Anton’s younger boy until Anton separated them. (There’s an implication in the script that Anton’s being a Swede rather than a Dane is significant. I didn’t get this: maybe it’s perceptible only to Scandinavian audiences.) Bier and Jensen may mean to suggest that the liberal, conscientious Anton finds it intolerable that, given the conditions he experiences in the Sudan, people can’t get on with each other in the relative stability and comfort of urban Denmark. It’s still jarring that Africa is presented primarily as a different landscape in which this European’s moral choices are made. The required hopefulness of the final Sudan sequence also sticks in your throat.

    It could also be argued that Susanne Bier attempts to equalise the African and European parts merely by working up the latter into a melodrama – so that the events in small-town Denmark become matters of life and death too. In fact, the Danish part has much more dramatic substance and tension then the Sudan part. In one sense, this reinforces the whole problem of the African scenes; yet it’s also what makes In a Better World a strong film. While Anton is pivotal to the Danish story, it’s the two early adolescent children – Markus Rygaard as Anton’s elder son Elias and, especially, William Jøhnk Juel Nielsen as his friend Christian – who are compelling. The sweet-natured Elias is bullied at school. It’s Christian’s outraged reaction to that which draws the two boys together in the first place. Elias and Christian could be seen as embodying different aspects of Anton – peacableness and a passion for justice respectively. But Christian is someone else’s son and it’s the relationship with his own father (Ulrich Thomsen) that gives the plot a real edge and grounding. Christian’s mother died recently of cancer. He can’t forgive his father for lying to him that she would recover – he accuses him of wanting her death. (And the father eventually admits that, when his wife’s pain and distress became intolerable to him, he did.)

    William Jøhnk Juel Nielsen is so convincing in expressing Christian’s furious, buried misery that the character gains an independence from the structure that Susanne Bier imposes. You believe this boy is unhappy enough to go all the way in getting his own back, no matter what happens as a result. When Christian makes a bomb to blow up the van of the mechanic who hit Anton, and he and Elias prepare to watch the explosion, it’s obvious what will happen. It’s the same when, at the film’s climax, the remorseful Christian stands on the roof of a silo: he looks down at the town harbour and the playground where the kids’ fight started it all – he’s now ready to end it all. These aren’t original scenes but Bier stages them (and directs the actors) with great conviction. It matters terribly, at an emotional level, what happens to the two boys.

    Mikael Persbrandt is a strong presence and the acting is generally good, even though the other adults (who include Wil Johnson as a doctor colleague of Anton’s) don’t make anything like the impression that the two youngsters do. There’s a good score by Johan Söderqvist and the film is well shot by Morton Søborg: the different visual colouring of the two continents has a texture lacking in the screenplay. I could have done without the beauties of nature montage at the end but if Susanne Bier’s images are pedestrian compared with Terrence Malick’s in The Tree of Life at least they’re over much more quickly.

    22 August 2011

  • A War

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Krigen

    Tobias Lindholm (2015)

    A War has been nominated for an Academy Award for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film.  In the first part of the movie, the juxtaposition of life at home and abroad and description of the various difficulties of both are reminiscent of Susanne Bier’s In a Better World, Denmark’s 2010 winner in the same Oscar category.  The writer-director Tobias Lindholm moves between scenes of warfare in Afghanistan, where Claus Pedersen (Pilou Asbæk) is an army company commander, and on the Danish home front, where his wife Maria (Tuva Novotny) holds their family together, though she and the Pedersens’ three young children miss Claus badly.  The Helmand Province sequences were filmed in Spain and Turkey but the members of the company, except for Claus and the other larger characters, are played by Danish soldiers who have actually served in Afghanistan.  Tobias Lindholm makes clear that military service in Helmand is gruelling – sometimes tedious, occasionally confusing, often on a knife-edge between life and death – and that these different aspects can quickly collide.  In an early scene, a young soldier called Anders (Alex Høgh Andersen) is one of a group on patrol.  He wears the look of sulky boredom that Ian Lavender sometimes gave Private Pike in Dad’s Army.  That makes it all the more shocking when, moments later, Anders is fatally injured by a landmine.  There’s camaraderie among the men too, of course, and Lindholm and his cast do a good job of showing the senior soldiers as sensitive but trained to keep a lid on feelings that will be unhelpful.  We’re shown, in particular, Claus’s admirable qualities.  He’s organised, compassionate, able to think on his feet, ready to lead from the front.  He shows skill and sympathy in dealing with Lasse (Dulfi Al-Jabouri), a soldier traumatised by his mate Anders’s death.

    These well-done sequences are a persuasive representation of the reality of twenty-first century warfare but, in dramatic terms, they’re little more than that. The same goes for the sequences back in Denmark, which are credible and unsurprising.  But as soon as Claus makes the snap decision on which Lindholm’s story pivots, A War acquires a new, gripping focus.  Claus’s instruction results in fatalities in ‘RS Compound 6’, a civilian rather than a military zone.  The plethora of code numbers and acronyms that have kept appearing in subtitles on the screen – it’s hard to get a handle on these – now take on a new and urgent meaning.  What information was transmitted, what got ignored in the moments leading up to Claus’s decision to attack?  He is immediately relieved of his duties in Afghanistan.  He goes home to Denmark to face trial for his actions and the virtual certainty of a prison sentence if he’s found guilty.   Claus was as keen to get back to his family as they were to have him back.  In the event, the circumstances of his instant return from Helmand disfigure the homecoming.  Maria’s welcome is muted:  she’s deeply relieved to see him again but puzzled and anxious as to why it’s happened so suddenly.  Once the children are in bed, Claus explains the situation to his wife.  Their conversation is shot through a picture window at the family home, and Claus and Maria’s words are unheard.  It’s a cinematic cliché but effective here in concentrating your attention on the couple’s body language.

    Does Claus tell the truth or lie for the sake of his family’s future and because, as Maria tells him, he’ll continue to feel guilty about what happened in Compound 6 even if he goes to jail?  Tobias Lindholm’s dramatisation of his protagonist’s crisis of conscience compares favourably with how moral dilemmas tend to be handled in mainstream Hollywood movies – even reasonably good ones, like Robert Zemeckis’s Flight (2012).  Claus – unlike the Denzel Washington character who eventually does-the-right-thing – isn’t compelled to admit he didn’t have the required notification that events occurring in Compound 6 had rendered it a military zone.   Following the ambivalent evidence given by his second-in-command (Dar Salim), Claus is given a lifeline through the testimony of another of the soldiers, whose admiration and loyalty he continues to command.  The eleventh-hour witness who changes everything is a familiar screen figure:  he seems less so here thanks to the trial proceedings being so distinctive.   In spite of having watched a fair amount of Scandi-noir on television, I don’t recall having seen Danish courtroom scenes before.  In A War, it’s almost amusingly different from what British audiences have come to expect that nearly everyone present at the trial, the judges included, wear casual dress.   It’s refreshing that neither the prosecutor (Charlotte Munck) nor Claus’s lawyer (Søren Malling) goes in for theatrical grandstanding, although both the actors concerned build good characterisations.   Because the trial isn’t conventionally melodramatic, it feels really dramatic.

    Claus is acquitted.  He’s much relieved, of course – like his wife and colleagues (and this viewer) – and, no more unexpectedly, is left with a guilty conscience.   Even so, you find yourself remembering his wife’s insistence that he would have had that behind bars.   The ‘happy ending’ for Claus is qualified also by the fact that his honourable military career has finished – not in conviction for a war crime but in defeat, nevertheless.  There are some wobbles in the closing stages of A War.  Søren Malling’s emphatic look of satisfaction at his vanquished courtroom adversary strikes a false note.  Lindholm’s cutting the sound again, when the presiding judge delivers the grounds for the verdict, seems merely an effect this time, and evasive.  When, back home, Claus says goodnight to one of his children and notices their bare toes peeping out from under the duvet, it rhymes with an earlier image of a dead  child whom he saw in Helmand.  The cue is unnecessary:  Tobias Lindholm has already, and more subtly, encouraged us to compare the Afghan children with Claus’s own.  In a generally strong cast, Pilou Asbæk is outstanding.  (He and Lindholm have worked together before, most recently in the director’s previous feature, A Hijacking.)  Asbæk is emotionally expressive and charismatic without ever resorting to histrionics.  He’s well supported by Tuva Novotny.  (The careworn Maria is strikingly different from Puck, the lead character Novotny played in the daft but enjoyable Swedish TV series Crimes of Passion, screened on BBC4 in 2014.)  Both main actors are especially good in a family outing to the seaside, shortly before the court’s judgment is delivered.  The fine hand-held camerawork in the Helmand Province sequences is by Magnus Nordenhof Jønck.

    12 January 2016

Posts navigation