Under sandet
Martin Zandvliet (2015)
During the occupation of Denmark in World War II, the German army laid more than two million mines along the country’s West Coast, as part of the coastal defence and fortifications that formed the Atlantic Wall. Following the liberation of Denmark in May 1945, the process of removing the mines began. Much of this work was carried out by some two thousand German prisoners of war, nearly half of whom were killed or lost limbs in landmine explosions. In the later stages of the War, the Nazis had enrolled increasingly young males for military service and a significant number of the POWs involved in the Danes’ landmine clearance were teenage boys. As the Danish army captain Ebbe (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard) says in Land of Mine, ‘If they’re old enough to fight they’re old enough to clear up their mess’. In his gruelling and gripping film – about a piece of history this viewer knew nothing about – the writer-director Martin Zandvliet concentrates on a particular group of young Germans, who defuse and remove mines from a stretch of beach under the supervision of a Danish sergeant, Carl Leopold Rasmussen (Roland Møller).
The opening scene sees a file of German soldiers straggling along a country road. The onlooking Rasmussen sets about two of the soldiers, wresting a Danish flag from them, abusing the pair verbally and physically. From the moment that Rasmussen viciously head-butts one of these soldiers, Martin Zandvliet transports his audience to unusual WW2 movie territory, where members of the Wehrmacht are the injured party (and the Danish military the oppressors). In at least one important respect, Zandvliet stacks the deck. In the course of the film, a total of fourteen German POWs are put in Sergeant Rasmussen’s charge. They look forward to post-war life back home and Helmut Morbach (Joel Basman) is the only one cynical about the prospect. None of them expresses a word of residual enthusiasm for the Nazi cause. They’re simply homesick teenagers – boys who, as the increasingly conflicted Rasmussen insists to Captain Ebbe at one point, cry for their mother. Rasmussen knows this for a fact: crying for his mother is just what Wilhelm Hahn (Leon Seidel) did, when a landmine blew his arms off.
Wilhelm, who subsequently dies of his injuries, is the earliest fatality among the group assigned to Rasmussen. After other deaths, the team has to be replenished; by the end of Land of Mine, only four of the fourteen have survived. Although there’s a built-in who’ll-get-it-next element to a story like this, it’s evident from the first explosion – while the boys are receiving training in mine defusal and before they join Rasmussen – that Martin Zandvliet has the skill and imagination to take you by surprise, and he does so repeatedly. You’re always aware of another fatal explosion in the offing, rarely prepared for exactly how and when it will occur. (The excellent editing is by Per Sandholt and Molly Malene Stensgaard.) The line-up includes some particularly likely candidates for horrifying death – a pair of twins among the German soldiers, Rasmussen’s dog, the infant daughter of the smallholder (Laura Bro) in whose outbuilding the POWs are lodged. The dog is killed; so too one of the twins (Oskar Belton). The surviving twin (Emil Belton) fails to come to terms with the loss of his brother and blows himself up – but only after saving the life of the little girl (Zoe Zandvliet, the director’s daughter), who has wandered into the beach minefield. In other words, the outcome is, in all these instances, predictable yet Zandvliet’s staging is never obvious. The most shocking moment occurs near the end of the film: seven of the young men are killed instantly, when a live landmine is accidentally thrown onto a truckload of deactivated mines.
At the heart of the film – what lifts it to another level – is Rasmussen. The teenagers who miss their mothers also need a father figure, a role for which the sergeant at first seems to be highly unsuited. Epitomising Danish hostility to the now-vanquished occupying forces, Rasmussen is an aggressive martinet, contemptuous of his charges. He takes out his feelings about Germany on these particular Germans for as long as he can. Doing so gets harder as he witnesses their terrifying daily routine on the beach and as the boys start to register with him as individuals. But Land of Mine is no facile heartwarmer about a man discovering his humanity. Rasmussen is an isolated figure who, almost throughout, keeps his feelings to himself. In this case, the dog really is man’s best friend. When it’s blown up running across an area of beach that had supposedly been made safe, the death is upsetting not just because an innocent animal has bought it but because we know what it meant to Rasmussen – we see him having to control his emotions before the boys can see. (They’re further away from him, as he discovers the dead dog, than the close-up camera.)
The incident occurs when relations between the POWs and their captor have become friendlier. Sebastian Schumann (Louis Hofmann), the most positive and individually enterprising of the boys (and in effect their moral leader), has from an early stage tried to do business with Rasmussen. The sergeant, with some reluctance, comes to respect Sebastian. Father figures loom large – in conversation about Sebastian’s father (his son doesn’t know if he’s still alive) and in Rasmussen’s imposing physical presence – in a subtle, occasionally humorous scene between them. Rasmussen and the boys have just been playing soccer on the beach when the dog gets killed. The aftermath is impressive in its emotional complexity and force. Rasmussen’s revenge on the boys is to force them to march together on other supposedly safe parts of the beach: he’s so upset by what’s happened that he doesn’t care if other active mines in the area have been missed. A sequence in which he orders one of the lads, Ludwig (Oskar Bökelmann), to move about on all fours and bark is doubly distressing – because of what Ludwig is made to do and because we feel it’s unworthy of Rasmussen. Perhaps what’s most daring in this part of the story is the suggestion that Rasmussen finds temporary relief in hating the boys again. He’s found his divided feelings to some extent troubling and they’ve certainly made unpopular with his army superiors. Now Rasmussen can resume doing his job properly. (It’s what happens when the little girl appears on the beach that breaks this spell.)
Although the above is the most striking example, Martin Zandvliet complicates the protagonist’s feelings and motivation consistently. Visiting Wilhelm in hospital, Rasmussen learns that he’s died. He then lies to the others – through a mixture of guilt and knowing they need to carry on their grim assignment – that Wilhelm is going to survive. (When Rasmussen later admits the truth to Sebastian, the latter immediately replies that he did right to lie, for the sake of keeping up team morale.) At the outset, Rasmussen tells the prisoners that, provided they defuse mines at a rate of six per hour, they’ll be allowed to return home to Germany in three months’ time. Once the job is done, Ebbe arranges for the four survivors – Sebastian, Ludwig, Helmut and Rodolf Selke (August Carter) – to be sent to work in another mine-clearing area. When his attempts to get Ebbe to rescind this order fail, Rasmussen rescues the quartet from their new detail, drives them to within five hundred metres of the German border and tells them to run. They do, though they more than once look back, with shocked gratitude, at Rasmussen. He is contained, even in this final self-sacrifice. Zandvliet’s writing of this character is admirable. Roland Møller plays him magnificently.
Captain Ebbe may be the embodiment of heartless nationalism and military calculation but Zandvliet and Mikkel Boe Følsgaard don’t make him crudely villainous: as Ebbe oversees the defusal training, he taps a baton impatiently but respects competence when he sees it among the prisoners. Most of the German prisoners were not inexperienced actors (their actual ages ranged from late teens to mid twenties). Although a few of them work a little too hard, they’re good – and a fine selection of distinctive faces, compared with their prettier counterparts in Dunkirk. The colouring of Land of Mine – the bleached shores under steely skies – is also more interesting than the Dunkirk palette: the cinematographer is Camilla Hjelm Knudsen (Zandvliet’s wife). Although the punning English translation of the original Danish title (‘Under the Sand’) is a bit laborious, it’s unarguably apt. Land of Mine was nominated for this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, along with A Man Called Ove, The Salesman, Toni Erdmann and Tanna. With the caveat that I’ve not seen the last-named, if I’d been an Academy member I think my vote would have gone to Martin Zandvliet’s film.
8 August 2017
