A Hijacking
Kapringen
Tobias Lindholm (2012)
As in the writer-director Tobias Lindholm’s latest film A War, the main character is a man in charge who’s not prepared to delegate and whose second-in-command who may resent this hands-on approach. The right-hand man is played, in both movies, by the expertly non-committal Dar Salim. While the two movies have different lead actors – Søren Malling in A Hijacking, Pilou Asbæk in A War – each has a key supporting role in the film in which they don’t play the main part. Lindholm evidently has, along with his interest in the psychology of leading from the front, a liking for simple, what-it-says-on-the-can titles. In A Hijacking, a Danish cargo ship, the ‘Rosen’, is hijacked in the Indian Ocean by Somali pirates. Peter Ludvigsen (Malling), CEO of the company that owns the ship, leads negotiations for the release of the crew. The action switches back and forth between the shipping company offices and the ‘Rosen’, where the seven-strong crew are separated by the pirates into two groups. One group, of four men, remains unseen for most of the film. The three on screen are the physically ailing captain (Keith Pearson), the engineer Jan Sørensen (Roland Møller) and, especially, the ship’s cook Mikkel Hartmann (Asbæk).
The company brings in a professional adviser on hostage situations. Connor Julian (Gary Skjoldmose Porter) immediately recommends the appointment of a neutral third party to handle negotiations on the company’s behalf and warns against acceding to the initial ransom demand because, he says, the pirates will then up the ante. Peter rejects the idea of a go-between. He insists that he will personally conduct negotiations. Tobias Lindholm doesn’t explain what motivates Peter in taking this position – or whether he is acting independently, or on behalf of the board of the shipping company, in gradually increasing the ransom offer as the days and weeks pass. (Representatives of the board put in an appearance only to indicate growing disquiet that the negotiations are distracting Peter from his other responsibilities as chief executive.) Peter’s main contact on the ship is Omar (Abdihakin Asgar), the negotiator-interpreter for the pirates though not himself one of them; but Mikkel, on the orders of his captors, occasionally speaks direct to Peter and the latter becomes increasingly concerned for Mikkel’s safety, above that of the other crew. There’s no explanation of this either. Lindholm seems less interested in Peter as a personality than as a dramatic device. His misgivings about the months-long duration of the hijacking aren’t enough for Peter to accelerate the incremental increases in what the company is prepared to pay the pirates: after all, Tobias Lindholm has a hundred minutes of screen time to fill.
The direction gives A Hijacking a good, documentary-like feel. The spatial and atmospheric contrasts between the ship and the company offices are effective enough – so too the set pieces that describe edgy camaraderie between captors and captives. But the dominant focus on one character in each of the key locations feels forced. The pirates keep four of the crew hidden only so that Lindholm can devote attention to Mikkel (and, to a much lesser extent, Jan: the captain’s ill health renders him semi-conscious and largely silent until he quickly perks up when needed in the closing stages). When he first hears the news of what’s happened on the ‘Rosen’, Peter has just sealed a deal with a group of Japanese businessmen – a deal that his colleague Lars Vestergaard (Salim) was unable to close without Peter’s help. The maximum that Peter is prepared to pay the Japanese is $15m (and he eventually beats them down to $14.5m); the pirates’ opening ransom demand is $15m. The juxtaposition between Peter’s swift, successful completion of the deal with the Japanese and the long drawn out, compromised nature of negotiations with the pirates is too pat. The drama also depends on some familiar details – such as the recently married Mikkel’s wedding ring, which he wears on a string round his neck, hides when the hijacking begins and eventually retrieves only when he thinks (mistakenly, of course) that it’s safe to do so.
Søren Malling’s blend of reserve and control is particularly effective at the start of A Hijacking. The continuing mystery of what makes Peter Ludvigsen tick means that the character becomes less intriguing than frustrating as the film goes on. (Peter’s outburst at his wife (Linda Laursen), who turns up a couple of times at the office where he now virtually lives, to bring her husband clean shirts, is baffling.) Gary Skjoldmose Porter gives Connor Julian a very believable professional fluency. (There’s nothing on his IMDB entry to suggest that Porter has acted before or since.) One of the film’s best moments comes when the watchful Lars Vestergaard opens his mouth with a suggestion that not only proves crucial in leading to a deal with the pirates but also amounts to a quiet revenge for being put in his place by Peter in the negotiations with the Japanese. Lars suggests that Peter up the offer, indicating that he’s prepared to go beyond the company’s maximum by putting his own money in: the eye contact between Søren Malling and Dar Salim at this point is terrific.
On board the ship, the effects of captivity stretching over three months are less than fully realistic but Pilou Asbæk’s gradual loss of energy and amiability is impressive and he’s given strong support by Roland Møller. The tensions between the crew and their kidnappers are expressed explosively and persuasively through verbal outbursts in which neither party understands the language of the other. One of the pirates is shown from an early stage to be a loose cannon (and proves it, shockingly, in the closing stages). Otherwise, the hijackers are not sharply characterised – this is effective in making them more dangerously unpredictable. A Hijacking is worth seeing but Lindholm’s A War is a better piece of work. So too, on balance, is Paul Greengrass’s Captain Phillips.
9 July 2016