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
