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Bastarden

Nikolaj Arcel

In the closing stages of Nikolaj Arcel’s The Promised Land, a minor character tells the main character that things rarely turn out as we expect them to.  What may be true in life isn’t true of this historical drama.  It’s impressive in several ways but you nearly always guess what’s coming next – and not just because of the introductory threat of violence, sex, discriminatory language and whatever else viewers may find upsetting, on which The Promised Land certainly delivers.  The gory images sometimes shock but they rarely surprise; the same goes for the racism and misogyny in evidence.  On-screen legends at the start, accompanying a shot of parched, empty terrain, explain that in the mid-eighteenth century the heath land of Jutland ‘could not be tamed’.  Cut to the opening scene, in which Ludvig Kahlen (Mads Mikkelsen), a recently retired army captain, seeks permission from the Danish royal court to build a property on the heath, which belongs to the Crown, with a view to cultivating the land.  Courtiers pooh-pooh the idea until one of them suggests that granting Kahlen’s request will, by providing the King with a new tenant, keep the monarch happy; even so, they scoff, ‘the heath cannot be tamed’.  I was reminded of one of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues, A Lady of Letters (1988).  Patricia Routledge’s Irene Ruddock complains that:

‘… when somebody in a novel says something like ‘I’ve never been in an air crash’, you know this means that five minutes later they will be.  … In stories saying it brings it on.  So if you get the heroine saying, ‘I don’t suppose I shall ever be happy’, then you can bank on it there’s happiness just around the corner.’

In other words, The Promised Land will be the story of how the heath is tamed.  Mads Mikkelsen soon makes grimly clear Kahlen’s iron will to succeed in the enterprise, come what may – so you can also be pretty sure that success will come at A Terrible Price.

Ludvig Kahlen was a real person (a Danish Wikipedia page gives his dates as 1700-1774) but The Promised Land has been adapted, by Arcel and Anders Thomas Jensen, from The Captain and Ann Barbara, a 2020 novel by Ida Jessen, reckoned to be only loosely ‘historical’.  According to the film’s Danish name, Kahlen is, as well as its protagonist, the title character – the illegitimate son of a housemaid and her master.  (This isn’t the first high-profile Danish picture of recent years whose blunt title has been changed for its release in Anglophone countries to a phrase that’s mildly ironic but a bland cliché.  The literal Danish meaning of Thomas Vinterberg’s Druk (2020) is ‘Drink’ or ‘Binge Drinking’; this became Another Round.)   Kahlen has retired from the German army after twenty-five years of service with only a meagre pension.  He means to establish a settlement on the heath and expects, in exchange for doing so, a noble title and a property that he will own.  When he eventually acquires both, they’re a bitter reminder of what he has lost in the process in personal terms.

From the start, Kahlen finds himself in conflict with Frederik Schinkel (Simon Bjenneberg) – aka Frederik De Schinkel:  he unfailingly corrects anyone who omits the nobiliary particle.  The owner of a manor house and its estate, as well as the local magistrate, Schinkel also insists that he’s the de facto owner of the heath land.  This malignant fop, as soon as he realises Kahlen isn’t going to roll over, avenges himself in ways both petty and homicidal.  Hosting a harvest ball, Schinkel insists that the socially inferior Kahlen exchange his moth-eaten wig for one that may be more upmarket but which makes him look silly.  Later in the evening, Schinkel presents for his guests’ entertainment Johannes Eriksen (Morten Hee Andersen).  Johannes and his wife, Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin), indentured serf farmers on Schinkel’s estate, escaped his cruel, abusive treatment and have been working for Kahlen in exchange for two meals a day and a roof over their heads.  Schinkel’s henchmen recapture Johannes.  Schinkel has him thrown into a cage beneath the ballroom floor and pours boiling water into it.  Johannes stops screaming only when he’s dead.

The villain’s hatred of Kahlen is increased by the attitude of Schinkel’s Norwegian fiancée, Edel (Kristine Kujath Thorp).  She’s not only reluctant to become his wife – it’s Edel’s hard-up father who insists on the marriage – but clearly has eyes for Kahlen.  It’s the widowed Ann Barbara, however, who, as well as keeping house for Ludvig, in due course shares his bed.  In addition to the Eriksens, Kahlen hires, also illegally, a group of Romani travellers to work for him.  When Johannes is murdered, all the travellers, with one exception, leave the heath.  The exception is a young girl, Anmai Mus (Melina Hagberg), who becomes the third member of Kahlen’s household, helping him and Ann Barbara, and being cared for by them.  Kahlen plants potatoes that he brought from Germany and, despite brutally adverse weather conditions, harvests eighty sacks of them.  The successful harvest leads the King to order a settlement on the estate and to confer on Kahlen the title of ‘Royal Surveyor’.  The German settlers that soon arrive demand that Kahlen get rid of the ‘darkling’ Anmai Mus:  their racist superstition tells them the child will bring misfortune to the land.  Kahlen strikes a compromise with them:  Anmai Mus will stay but indoors – out of sight, out of mind.

Kahlen’s success drives the enraged Schinkel to further extremes, using convicted criminals to attack the settlement.  Two settlers and half the livestock are killed.  Kahlen, with the help of other settlers, ambushes and kills the criminals but is now forced, in exchange for the Germans’ help, to send Anmai Mus away.  Appalled by his betrayal of the girl, Ann Barbara leaves, too.  The violent happenings are reported to the King’s cabinet and ownership of the land is transferred to Schinkel; Kahlen is arrested and held on the estate of his arch enemy.  His torture there is getting underway when Ann Barbara returns to the film.  She prepares a poisoned drink for Schinkel and Edel sees that he drinks it; he collapses and writhes on the floor.  Enter Ann Barbara, with a knife.  She stabs Schinkel in the stomach then castrates him, and he dies of his wounds.  Although Ann Barbara’s reappearance is melodramatic, Schinkel’s gruesome fate does chime with one of the film’s outstanding passages of dialogue.  When his hostility towards Kahlen is still at an early stage, the two men engage in a debate about order vs chaos.  Kahlen is determined to believe in the former; Schinkel, perhaps aware of his own abysmal amorality, commends the latter.  He asks Kahlen what purpose it serves to ‘castrate’ the wilderness of the heath.  Ann Barbara does what she does to Schinkel because of what he did to her husband (and what his sexual equipment has done to her and other women on his estate).  But that earlier exchange with Kahlen gives Schinkel’s castration a further level of poetic justice.

The Promised Land is excellently acted throughout.  Mads Mikkelsen is the right man for the role of Ludvig Kahlen:  his strong presence embodies Kahlen’s strength of purpose; Mikkelsen is expert, too, at internalising a character’s feelings but letting the viewer – as distinct from other people on the screen – see inside him.  All three main female roles are very well played, especially Melina Hagberg’s Anmai Mus:  her eccentricity seems entirely natural, her quiet vulnerability is eloquent.  Other than Mikkelsen and Søren Malling (as a courtier), the only actor I recognised was Morten Hee Andersen, as the ill-fated Johannes.  (Andersen has proved his versatility in recent TV dramas, including Ride Upon the Storm (Herrens Veje); he was the younger son of the priest played by Mads Mikkelsen’s brother, Lars.)  Simon Bjenneberg is remarkable:  Schinkel is vicious and weak, and Bjenneberg makes both aspects of him magnetic.  These are so finely balanced that Schinkel is the one character who occasionally does take you by surprise.  Kahlen pulls a gun on him and the look in Schinkel’s eyes asks Kahlen to pull the trigger.   Schinkel tries and, when she struggles, fails to have his way with one of his maids; so he pushes her through an upstairs window to her death.

Schinkel is so crazy that it’s hard to see him as representative of a heartless landowning class.  His torture of Johannes Eriksen is prolonged enough to alienate his ball guests.  Although his fellow landowners sympathise with the problems that Kahlen poses, Schinkel falls out with them.  The contrast between him and the King – a decidedly absentee landlord – is bleakly amusing, though.  The Kahlen-Schinkel dynamic isn’t a million miles away from the central male dynamic in Nikolaj Arcel’s best-known film and earlier collaboration with Mads Mikkelsen, A Royal Affair (2012), which pitted Mikkelsen’s Enlightenment man against the younger, mentally unstable King Christian VII, played by Mikkel Boe Folsgaard.  (The monarch in The Promised Land, which begins in 1755, is presumably Frederick V, Christian’s immediate predecessor on the Danish throne.)  The two films also have in common the brilliant lighting of cinematographer Rasmus Videbæk.  The candlelight scenes in The Promised Land are particularly extraordinary although they may be too beautiful.  These images, like some of those in A Royal Affair, are designed to evoke pieces of art history.  Perhaps Arcel means to point up the dichotomy between luminous pictorial beauty and the black deeds going on in the story but, if so, the result is rather too artful.

Also as in A Royal Affair, Arcel shows himself a confident, if conventional, storyteller.  For example, with Videbæk’s help, he describes economically but expressively the passage of seasons and the extremes of weather that Kahlen and his helpers have to cope with.  But the last quarter-hour is so rushed that the film seems to be working to a curfew.  Schinkel’s butler (Thomas W Gabrielsson) explains to the cabinet the circumstances of his master’s murder; Kahlen is freed from his underground prison but Ann Barbara is jailed for life; Edel returns to Norway; Kahlen heads for the orphanage where he sent Anmai Mus and brings her back to the farm; years pass; Kahlen is told that he’s been made a baron and will receive four hundred new settlers; Anmai Mus, now a teenager (Laura Bilgrau Eskild-Jensen), keeps house for him until she claps eyes on a good-looking young man in a group of Romanis that happens to stop by, who she goes off with; Kahlen deserts the land and has his title annulled; he (somehow) finds Ann Barbara, among a cartload of prisoners being transported to their next jail; Kahlen and she ride away together on his horse, and head for the Jutland coast, where Ann Barbara has always dreamed of settling down.  Phew.

The outstanding contribution to the finale comes from Trappaud (Jacob Lohmann).  This is the same character – I was never sure who he was exactly – who tells Kahlen that life doesn’t turn out the way you expect.  Just before doing that, Anmai Mus asks Trappaud how his haemorrhoids are.  This is a good joke:  each time we’ve seen Trappaud previously he has bemoaned his condition; since Anmai Mus is suddenly several years older than before, we assume that he has kept up his moans in the interim.  His reply to Anmai Mus is even better, though.  He has finally decided, he tells her, to stop talking about his haemorrhoids.  There’s no point.  ‘No one understands the pain I’m in’.

24 August 2024