Kongens nei
Erik Poppe (2016)
In April 1940 King Haakon VII of Norway, defying pressure from Nazi Germany, refused to approve the appointment of Vidkun Quisling as prime minister and head of a German puppet government. Haakon also insisted that the decision on Quisling must lie with the Norwegian cabinet. The king offered to abdicate if they took a different view but the cabinet endorsed his position. The Germans retaliated instantly by bombing Elverum, where the royal family and the cabinet had temporarily relocated. The monarch and others escaped to Britain, where they remained until 1945. Haakon’s stand proved to be a crucial force for sustaining Norwegian resistance to the Nazi occupation of the country throughout the war years.
The difference between the original title of Erik Poppe’s account of these events and its English translation summarises how differently Norwegian and Anglophone audiences are likely to experience this historical drama – at least if the Anglophones are as ignorant as I was about Norway’s situation in World War II. (I’d heard of Quisling, and that’s about it.) The Norwegian title literally means ‘The King’s No’. Haakon’s refusal is a celebrated part of national history: it would make no sense for a Norwegian director to conceal the royal ‘no’ as a ‘choice’. It’s true Poppe’s consistently admiring portrait makes it pretty clear to any viewer what the king will eventually decide but there’s still an element of suspense if you don’t know the facts beforehand. The English title is apt too in that the climactic choice isn’t the only one the protagonist makes.
His first choice – to accept the throne of Norway – is explained in a prologue that combines plenty of text on screen with archive film from the early years of the twentieth century. In 1905, in the light of dissolution of the Union between Sweden and Norway, the Norwegian government considered several princes of European royal houses for the crown. Prince Carl of Denmark emerged as the favoured candidate: he was descended from independent Norwegian kings and conveniently had an infant son, Olav, who would be heir apparent to the throne. When formally offered the crown, Carl accepted but only on condition that the government’s (and parliament’s) choice was ratified through a referendum of the Norwegian people. As Poppe’s film makes clear, it continued to matter to Haakon VII, as he became on accession to the throne of Norway, that his kingship was democratically approved. The King’s Choice also points up the remarkable irony that a monarch whose role was meant to be strictly ceremonial came to make a momentous political decision.
The opening newsreel isn’t just fascinating in itself. It’s also refreshing to see the real dramatis personae at the beginning of a movie rather than the end, where their appearance can suddenly confuse or dilute the impression made by the actors who’ve been incarnating them. At the start, the actual people concerned supply a route into The King’s Choice. The following two hours are consistently absorbing and include some fine sequences yet the film often has the feel of documentary drama. It’s possible that Poppe’s two obvious means of compelling attention reflect anxiety on his part that the screenplay (by Harald Rosenløw-Eeg and Jan Trygve Røyneland) isn’t quite enough. It’s unfortunate that these superficial devices – overly conspicuous camera movement and overemphatic signposting of time and place – have the effect of reinforcing a sense of dramatic insufficiency.
Political events in Norway in early April 1940 moved very quickly. Most of the film’s action is concentrated into three days, and this is the justification for Poppe’s precise scene-setting. Each move forward in time is marked by an intertitle, along the lines of ‘Elverum, 9th April, 11.20 am’. The intertitles appear as white text on a black screen. There’s no overlooking them. Poppe earns full marks for clarity. But these regular momentary breaks in the narrative also interrupt your involvement in it. They sharpen your awareness that you’re watching a reconstruction. The hyperactive parts of the camerawork (the DP is John Christian Rosenlund) also take you out of the drama. When German aircraft fire on Elverum and Haakon, with other members of the royal family and the government, run for their lives, the handheld camera is effective – the sense of disorientation strengthens the scene. It would have even more impact, though, if Poppe hadn’t already had the camera whizzing from one character to another in indoor sequences, merely as a means of getting ‘movement’ into dialogue exchanges.
Jesper Christensen, one of the outstanding European screen actors of his generation, elevates The King’s Choice almost single-handedly. Christensen was sixty-eight in 2016, exactly the age that Haakon VII was in 1940, but they’re physically not so similar. The king (over 6’ 2”) was a good three inches taller than the actor playing him: Christensen must be wearing lifts. More important, he wears heavy make-up – I hardly recognised him in his opening scene and worried he might be submerged in disguise for longer than that. Christensen soon shines through, though. The script does give him opportunities to show a monarch’s more private side and these are highlights of the film – Haakon chatting and playing with his grandchildren, letting his age and weariness show when he’s on his own. There’s also an excellent conversation between the king and a young guardsman (Arthur Hakalahti). By the end of the film, Christensen has created an authentically noble figure.
The scenes illustrating tensions between the king and Crown Prince Olav are conventional but Anders Baasmo Christiansen is increasingly convincing as Olav. The other main character is the German envoy, Curt Bräuer. Karl Markovics plays him well enough but the dramatisation of Bräuer’s thankless intermediary task is unimaginative and the attempt to work up the issues he faced as a complement to those confronting Haakon feels mechanical. The King’s Choice appeared very shortly after Martin Zandvliet’s Land of Mine, a Danish film with a World War II setting. (To be precise, Zandvliet’s drama was set in the immediate aftermath of the end of hostilities but the proximity of these two Scandinavian WWII history films is still striking.) The King’s Choice isn’t as good as Land of Mine but it tells a story well worth telling to an international audience – and it’s a story that Jesper Christensen makes memorable.
21 July 2020
