Jagten

Thomas Vinterberg  (2012)

The Hunt is set in a small Danish town.  Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen), a nursery school teacher, is accused by a little girl – the daughter of one of Lucas’s best friends – of sexually abusing her.  The accusations catch fire and Lucas is ostracised and, more than once, on the receiving end of physical violence meted out by members of the local community.  The subject of Thomas Vinterberg’s film is the spread of hysterical rumour and suspicion – a well-worn theme of stage and screen drama.  (Examples that come instantly to mind are The Children’s Hour, The Crucible and A Cry in the Dark.)  Vinterberg, who co-wrote the screenplay with Tobias Lindholm, also makes use of the subsidiary cliché of the hunter hunted (Lucas and the bluff, hearty friends he has at the start, enjoy deer hunting).  Perhaps you’re meant to think the setting of the story is so out in the sticks that the inhabitants have never seen this kind of thing at the movies.  If they had, they’d be more aware of the overwrought predictability of the film they’re part of.  (In fact, the town’s residents include some evidently well-off and sophisticated individuals, who react in the same way as the less refined.)   People in the audience at Curzon Soho were regularly exclaiming in outrage at what they were seeing on screen as the burghers turned on Lucas.  I was with them in one sense but it was the filmmaking I was outraged by.

Here’s another new film that depends for impact on the reality of the protagonist’s unenviable circumstances but has no interest in taking time and effort to create a believable series of events or reactions to those events. Thomas Vinterberg wants to show the violent and distressing effects of the town’s hysterical prejudice but the outbreak of that prejudice is based on a shaky foundation.  Six-year-old Klara (Annika Wedderkopp) accuses Lucas shortly after her elder brother and his friend have shown her a picture of an erect penis and Lucas has carefully distanced himself when Klara tries to kiss him during playtime at the school.  We hear repeatedly not only from her parents that Klara never lies but also from the head of the nursery school that ‘children tell the truth’.  The parents’ assertion about their own child is reasonably believable.  The head’s axiom is incredible.  (It would be more credible coming from the mouth of someone who had no contact with children – whose rose-coloured view was insulated from reality – than from a woman earning her living working with them.)  Although Lucas is briefly in custody we don’t see the police interviewing him; if we did, Vinterberg would have to produce evidence more substantial than the initial story that Klara tells.  Indeed, Klara herself soon seems doubtful about that story – even as she’s encouraged by her parents to stick to it.

The Hunt might be persuasive if there were variation in the ways in which Klara’s family, and Lucas’s friends and work colleagues, and locals who know him less well, form their view that he’s guilty.  There’s no such variation, however, nor any sign of ambivalence.  Vinterberg doesn’t explore either why people should (as it seems) be determined to think the worst.  Why doesn’t Lucas go to the police when his dog is killed by avenging locals, and he’s brutally assaulted in a supermarket by staff who refuse to serve him there?  The answer is because that would force the director to address whether the police were part of the community’s aggressive intolerance or able and willing to keep it under control.  In a typical but especially melodramatic sequence at a Christmas Eve church service, the desperate, exasperated Lucas staggers in and sets about Klara’s father, Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen).  None of the congregation intervenes – or even asks the visibly shaken Theo if he needs a doctor.  The priest gawps like everyone else, doesn’t even acknowledge that the service has been interrupted.

In this crudely determined set-up, it’s not surprising that the few people who believe in Lucas’s innocence – or are unhappily doubtful – are a relatively believable relief.  Shortly before the non-event at the nursery school, Lucas, whose marriage has recently ended (and who also lost his job teaching older children when another local school closed down), learns that his teenage son Marcus is going to come to live with him, instead of with Lucas’s ex-wife.  What happens as a consequence of Klara’s untruths is obvious enough (although here too Vinterberg and Lindholm’s writing is sketchy) but Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrom) is determined to defend his father.  In one of the film’s rare moments of quasi-humour, Lucas, released by the police, and Marcus are reunited and embrace:  ‘Don’t hug your son!’ calls out Lucas’s loyal friend Bruun (Lars Ranthe), ‘They’ll take you back into custody!’  The break-up of Lucas’s relationship with Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport), the one person at the nursery school who doesn’t instantly take against him, is genuinely painful.  The other character with mixed feelings is, of course, Klara and Vinterberg directs Annika Wedderkopp skilfully:  she’s very convincing in how she registers uncertainty – about not only the story she told but why she’s expected to continue to insist it’s true.  You can hardly not sympathise with Lucas, considering what he has to go through, and this feeling fuses with admiration for Mads Mikkelsen (who won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his pains).  Lucas’s story is full of florid false notes but these are remarkably absent from the performance of the actor playing him.

The Hunt runs 106 minutes.  There can’t have been many of them left when a fire alarm went off and we had to leave the cinema.  By this stage, I was too annoyed by the film to be willing to stand in the rain in Shaftesbury Avenue waiting for the all clear.  I headed home but wish now I’d stayed.  Sitting through most of this bad, overrated movie but not quite seeing it through has made the experience all the more irritating.

6 December 2012