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