A WAR (Krigen, 2015)

The team of writer-director Tobias Lindholm and star Pilou Asbaek resume the war on terror in their follow-up to 2012's Kapringen (A Hijacking). Denmark has been part of the coalition occupying Afghanistan and training anti-Taliban forces since 2001. A Danish officer, Claus (Asbaek) tries to maintain ties with his family at home while dealing with the stresses of war. When his men give first aid to an Afghan child, the girl's family is targeted by the Taliban as collaborators. Claus refuses to shelter the family in the Danish base overnight, promising them that his unit will secure them and their community the following day. The troops arrive to find the family massacred in their beds. Moments later they come under attack themselves. With one man wounded badly in the neck Claus needs to neutralize the threat before a medevac can arrive. He has a rough idea where the fire is coming from, but the rules of engagement require visual confirmation before an air strike can be ordered. Even though he can't see a gun or gunmen, he affirms that he has "PID" and the attackers are blown away. The medevac arrives and the wounded, temporarily mute trooper survives to communicate Don't Look Back style with his buddies from a British hospital.

 

Claus soon learns that there were 11 civilians in the building that was bombed. His troops carry recording devices, one of which caught him telling his radio man to say he had PID. The recording appears to implicate Claus in a war crime if a panel interprets it -- as would be correct -- to mean the radio man should lie. He's recalled to Denmark for the hearing and a family reunion, his wife urging him to perjure himself to spare himself (and his family) four years in prison. The most he can bring himself to do is fudge his testimony, telling the prosecutor that he can't recall exactly when he got the crucial PID. Fortunately (I suppose), one of his men steps up and commits the necessary perjury, testifying (to the prosecutor's furious dismay) that he provided the PID by seeing a muzzle flash from the doomed building. It's pretty transparent perjury; the prosecutor rightly asks why it never occurred to this soldier to mention this exculpatory detail for months before the trial. But it gives everyone else what they seem to want: an excuse to acquit Claus. Claus, however, doesn't feel particularly excused. Asbaek and Lindholm make us feel his shame at having to be saved by lies without having him express it. There's a laconic quality to Krigen that makes it easy to imagine an American remake directed by Clint Eastwood, especially since it resembles a kind of cross between American Sniper and Sully. While audiences clearly will empathize with Claus, considering his action in Afghanistan perfectly justified -- the shooting stops once the bombs drop, after all -- but that same empathy complicates the conclusion once we understand that our hero doesn't share any sense we have of his vindication. Instead, he's haunted by the sight of his youngest son's bare feet peeping out from under a blanket, mirroring the dead feet of that Afghan boy whose fate he sealed by refusing his family shelter. The rules of engagement may say one thing about his responsibility for lives lost, and public opinion may say something else, but it looks like Claus may be his own harshest judge. His future is left to our imagination, but our ability to imagine it plausibly is a tribute to an actor and auteur who have become a team to watch whenever they get together.

 

JAUJA (2014)

International man of cinema Viggo Mortensen returns in a role that allows him to try Spanish again, after his mixed reviews for Captain Alatriste, as well as his ancestral Danish. Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso and co-writer Fabian Casas have crafted a tale that resembles The Searchers on the scale and in the tone of Meek's Cutoff, with a folkloric if not fairy-tale quality that should have tipped me off that something more or less than meets the eye was going on. There's a studied primitivism to this period piece; leave out the fine color cinematography of Timo Salminen and it could have been made almost the same way one hundred years ago. Alonso works in long takes, in scenes that aren't built around dialogue, requiring Mortensen in particular to do a lot of non-verbal business to help define his character. The director likes to show characters taking their time coming toward us, then taking their time moving away from us. He emphasizes the spatial relationships between his characters. In an early shot, a soldier is bathing and masturbating in a small natural pool. While he works himself over, a figure appears in the distance from screen right. A cut reveals this newcomer as Mortensen, whom we watch puttering about as the soldier, now in the distance, dries up, dresses, and approaches him. There's something inherently old-fashioned about the pacing that enhances the period feel of the scene. Alonso has an effective style that looks superficially like an absence of style.

 

Mortensen plays Gunnar Dinesen -- is there a homage to Karen "Isak Dinesen" Blixen of Out of Africa fame there? -- an engineer and advisor to the Argentian army, apparently concerned above all with keeping his daughter (Viilbjørk Malling Agger) away from that wanker and other soldiers. His efforts avail him not, as Ingeborg elopes with a younger, better looking soldier. We're in Searchers territory once Dinesen heads out alone in pursuit of the couple, with all three in danger from renegades. Gradually it seems to become a different kind of quest, or else a different kind of story altogether.

 

Alonso's neo-primitivist storytelling leads you to believe that Jauja is some sort of naturalist narrative, but all along there's something almost too quaint about it. It could be the curved corners of the old-timey 1:33 aspect-ratio frame, which made me think of 19th century photographs. Maybe there's something too obviously archetypal about it, apart from the most obvious Searchers references. And maybe a spoiler warning is in order, since at a certain point, when Dinesen encounters an old woman in a cave, Alonso's tale becomes something more like a dream, or a blood memory half-recovered in a dream. The film ends far in time and place from Patagonia, but the message seems to be that dreams, myths or archetypes can transcend distance, or else that the distance between present and past, or history and dream. is even less. You can complain that this takes you right out of the picture, if you wanted to know what happened when Dinesen caught up with his daughter. But maybe a point is being made about your offended sense of linear time when a film finds reason to remind you that it's only a film, and all of it only fiction. You may try to reclaim some sort of linearity by figuring out who the girl in modern dress is, and the director himself leaves clues that point to the relevance of the Dinesen story to the present-day epilogue. But there's no denying that Jauja is the sort of film that will leave people asking "Is that it?" in way that questions whether there was ever an it to it. I suspect that there is an it to it after all, but I'm not sure yet whether there's enough of it to justify the tease that Jauja perpetrates. There's still the beautiful cinematography, the admirably laconic direction, and a fine, fully committed physical performance from co-producer Mortensen, and the twist, if you want to call it that, doesn't take any of that away. Watch the film for those, and judge the rest for yourselves.

A HIJACKING (Kapringen, 2012)

Somali pirates are a great movie subject because, well, they're pirates. In the past two years global moviegoers have seen two distinct portrayals of their depredations. Americans are more familiar with Paul Greengrass's Tom Hanks vehicle Captain Phillips, but Danish writer-director Tobias Lindholm (whose previous film was the prison flick R.) got to the topic first. Greengrass is admired for his semidocumentary style, but Lindholm's movie has more of a documentary look if only because his film, compared to a Hollywood project, shares most documentaries' budgetary constraints. Also, Greengrass is as much an action specialist as a stylist, and Kapringen is nothing like an action movie; it's intimate rather than spectacular. The two films can share the general subject because of the stark difference in each director's approach.

In Captain Phillips the pirates' boarding of the Maersk Alabama is arguably the year's most thrilling action sequence; in Kapringen the pirates' boarding of the MV Rozen is presented as a fait accompli. Captain Phillips aspires to short-term suspense as the captain and the pirates play a cat-and-mouse game during what feels like a very brief takeover of the Alabama, while the real subject of Kapringen is the slow-motion terror of tedium in captivity. In Phillips the pirate leader tries to entice the captain into compliance with the promise of quick negotiations, a quick payday for the pirates and a quick release for the captive crew, but Kapringen suggests that such a promise is false, or at least overly optimistic. The pirates in Phillips simply want to do business, and Kapringen shows us what that means. The pirates make a ransom demand ($15,000,000) and the ship's owners, only occasionally listening to the advice of their hired negotiation specialist, try to talk the number down beneath a mere million. The final figure of $3,800,000 is reached after months of captivity for the Rozen crew. We endure this mostly from the viewpoint of the ship's Danish cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbaek), who has a wife and kid at home looking for answers from the employers who fancy themselves hardball negotiators, who can tell the family that Mikkel is OK after a nightmare negotiation out of Ron Howard's Ransom, with the CEO's "Don't fuck with me!" raving answered with the sound of gunshots on the ship. The potential heartlessness of the people who have to pay ransoms is a subject Captain Phillips, for all its other virtues and its stated concern with the rat race forced on everybody, seems happy to avoid.

But Kapringen isn't primarily a jeremiad against corporations. Lindholm is as much interested in the exhausted camaraderie, somewhat sort of Stockholm Syndrome, that develops between captives and pirates, and in the cycles of frustration and plain boredom that sometimes drive casual cruelty. At one moment pirates may point rifles at the back of Mikkel's head; in another they'll join in a chorus of "Happy Birthday to You" in honor of Mikkel's daughter.

The results are nearly as suspenseful as in Captain Phillips, each picture earning its suspense in different ways. Because of the duration of the Rozen's ordeal, Kapringen is more horrific in a suffocatingly intimate way, while Mikkel's realistic helplessness raises the stakes (and our frustration with the suits) during the negotiation scenes. Lindholm's low-key direction can't compete with Greengrass's spectacular intensity in pure-cinema terms, but Kapringen and Captain Phillips prove to be quite complementary movies that could co-exist nicely as a double feature without either seeming redundant. Piracy off the Horn of Africa is a subject that may yet be far from exhausted.

DAY OF WRATH (Vredens Dag, 1943)

The Nazis couldn't kid themselves the way Communists did sometimes. You could get away every so often with making a movie about witch-hunting in a Communist country as long as the authorities could tell themselves it wasn't about them, but about the supersitious bourgeois past. But when Carl Theodor Dreyer made a film that superficially concerned with witch-mania in old Denmark, the country's Nazi occupiers apparently assumed it was about them. Thought they apparently let the film play, they gave Dreyer enough grief that he fled to Sweden. On one level, you can see a Nazi's point. Vredens Dag describes a society where people are put to torture and compelled not just to admit ridiculous charges against themselves but to denounce others for equally ridiculous offenses. That touches a sore spot with fanatics everywhere. But Dreyer's film isn't exactly The Crucible. It isn't about a heroic refusal to make false denunciations. It's about the double standards that spare some while sending others to the stake, and it ends with someone making an uncoerced confession of a ludicrous crime.

Absalon (Thorkild Roose) is a middle-aged widowed pastor who has married again despite the disapproval of his elderly mother. He has a grown son, Martin (Preben Lerdoff Rye), who has a hard time thinking of Anne (Lisbeth Movin) as his mother. Once Martin is back from school, however, he has a hard time not thinking of Anne. Anne has an easy time thinking of Martin; the lad could give her the happiness Absalon doesn't seem capable of giving. The old man may be too preoccupied with his responsibilities as a minister to accused witches. He comes under pressure when the authorities catch an accused witch, Marthe (Anne Svierkier), hiding in his own house. The old hag had been picking herbs for Anne, who offered her shelter. Marthe thinks she has leverage on Absalon because he had once intervened to spare an accused witch who happened to be Anne's mother. Marthe insists that he intervene on her behalf or else she'll denounce Anne. Absalon refuses to comply but Marthe never follows through on her threat -- not under torture and not as she's sent to the stake. Not that you get much chance to rant there; in Denmark they drop you face first onto the bonfire. Meanwhile, Absalon's mother, who probably figures that Anne put some sort of spell on her son, now sees her working the same wiles on her grandson. All this stress is likely to drive poor Absalon to an early grave. If it happens, how much will Anne be to blame? And how do you characterize her offense in the idiom of 17th century Denmark. Could you call it anything else but witchcraft?...

While The Crucible focuses on the injustice of witch trials and builds up the background of accused and accusers to underscore the procedural injustice, Day of Wrath probes the intimate anxieties, rivalries and hatreds that must have seemed to simpler, superstitious generations like the devil at work in their hearts and minds. In its emphasis on overpowering urges and mortal consequences it resembles an American film noir, with Lisbeth Movin a worthy rival to Hollywood's femme-fatale specialists, more closely than it resembles a political allegory. Dreyer films the proceedings in an austere yet fluid style; his camera moves frequently without calling attention to its mobility. He doesn't fetishize the tortures of witchfinding, but the mere sight of fat old Marthe stripped topless for forceful interrogation is appallingly suggestive. Overall, Dreyer succeeds in creating a sense of lived-in antiquity and lets the actors do the rest. This is a film of memorable faces, with Movin, Roose and Sigrid Neiiendam as Absalon's mother making indelible impressions. Movin may have the more flamboyant role but Roose made the strongest impression on me. In many ways the image of a puritanical patriarch, he effectively embodies the contradictions and hypocrisies of his roles as confessor, counselor and comforter, spiritual leader and lonely man who's lost track of his longings. Nevertheless, the big moment and climactic mystery belong to Movin. Is her ultimate confession merely acquiescence to the inevitable once the wheels of injustice are set in motion, or is it a spontaneous confession of guilt, a revelation to herself of feelings she hadn't acknowledged for someone she'd wronged? Does she actually suddenly see herself as a witch, and what does the label mean to her? These questions transcend politics and elevate Dreyer's film above mere allegory. They remain relevant even when we don't call each other witches anymore, as long as we still seem capable of cursing each other merely by coexisting.

R. (2010)

Time for a change of pace -- so how about a Danish prison film? This debut film co-directed by Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm is as dark and merciless an entry in this genre as I've seen in a while, an uncompromising descent into hell. R stands for Rune (Pilou Asbek), who's in trouble as soon as he's left in his prison "house" because he'd stabbed a friend of one of the skinheads inside. He's hardly settled before he has to beat up "the Armenian" and bash the man's teeth in against a set of stairs in a suggestively sickening bit of violence -- the victim's face is wrapped in cloth so we don't see the worst. That still leaves Rune the low man on the totem pole, subject to constant humiliation and menace. A neat freak, he's soon put to work by the convicts cleaning toilets and the like while they mess up his "house" and draw obscene cartoons on photos of his girlfriend. Asbek's face is locked in a glower of perpetual desperation that seems entirely appropriate to his situation.

But R also stands for Rashid (Dulfi al-Jabouri), a Muslim con close to Rune's age who came in on the same transport and is stored with other Muslims on the level below Rune and the skinheads. Co-workers on the kitchen staff, Rune and Rashid figure out their own toilet-delivery system involving the shells of Kinder Surprise eggs to make themselves useful to the intra-penitentiary drug trade and lift some of the pressure off their heads. Theirs seems an unlikely alliance across ethnic and religous lines, but similar alliances are possible for the purpose of preying on the young convicts and betraying whatever group solidarity exists behind bars. The film demonstrates with grim certitude that it would make no difference had we followed Rashid rather than Rune through the entire picture, as their fates prove all too similar.

You could believe that Noer and Lindholm intended their movie as a corrective to Jacques Audiard's Un Prophete, the French film hailed as the best prison film of the past decade. Without disparaging Audiard at all, his tale of a young con's unlikely rise to power in prison looks like a melodramatic adventure tale compared to the miseries of R. While Audiard was working with a larger context of demographic change in the French underworld, Noer and Lindholm make their drab prison a nightmare of perpetual bullying adolescence. The banal decorations -- potted plants in the halls and such -- give the Danish pen a dormitory look that invites comparisons between the sufferings of Rune and the hazings of a private school. The cruel genius of the story is the way the directors present the intense Asbek as a ticking bomb, but thwart our expectation of release through some ultimate explosion. At a crucial moment, the focus shifts from Rune to Rashid to emphasize their commonality rather than either man's exceptional potential.

Even more cruel, perhaps, is the co-writers' determination not to reduce the trouble with prison to racial or religious conflict. Instead, they give us ample evidence that humanity itself, in the stunted form that flourishes in stir, is the essential problem, and that race or religion offer no real security to anyone, except possibly at the top of the parochial food chain. R's spiritual cruelty may turn off many viewers, but it's also the film's chief virtue -- take it or leave it. For the writer-directors it's a formidable debut, and considerable credit is also due to cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jonck and set decorator Holger Vig for creating a suitably bleak, often evilly banal environment for the story. Noer, Lindholm and Asbek won the big Danish movie awards this year, and without seeing their competition I feel confident that they earned them.

Here's a trailer -- with regrettably censored English subtitles, uploaded by NewTrailersUK.

In Brief: VALHALLA RISING (2009)

Nicolas Winding Refn's Dark Age thriller is such a cruel picture that the hero is a murderous mute -- and they call him One-Eye! Need I say more? I suppose I should, since the film is probably only an accidental homage to Bo Vibenius's female-revenge extravaganza. If it's a conscious homage to anything it may be to Apocalypse Now -- think of this as Apocalypse Retro. It deals with Vikings, unrepentant pagans driven to the ends of the earth by the advance of Christianity. We find them in a desolate landscape with a prisoner in tow. This is the mute (Mads Mikkelsen), a sort of fighting slave with a high turnover rate of masters. For entertainment men match their might against his. They die. He snaps their necks with his chain, wrapping it around then running until he hits the end of his tether. Sometimes he has a rock handy to smash a skull with. He's getting tired of it; he's having visions. In a stream he finds an arrowhead. He uses it to unbind himself while in transit and kill his captors -- all save the boy who had fed him, who now chooses to follow him. Where else is he going to go? Home? He doesn't know where that is any more. Where's the mute going? He probably has a better idea of when than where.

Neck snapping, head cutting: One-Eye (Mads Mikkelsen) can do it all.

The unlikely pair stroll into a camp of raiders stocked with burnt corpses and naked enslaved females. These raiders are Christians; apparently they were raising funds to go on Crusade in the Holy Land. Judging "One-Eye" (so the boy now calls him, since "You have to have a name, and you've got one eye.") a tough customer, and unwilling to fight him, the crusaders invite him on board their boat. He and the boy accept. They seem to spend weeks adrift in a mist until the men feel accursed. Some want to blame the boy, but One-Eye isn't having that. But before things deteriorate further a taste of the water reveals that they're now upstream on the mainland somewhere. That somewhere, from the looks of things, seems to be North America, and the natives are not friendly. One by one the inadvertent invaders are picked off or disappear, while One-Eye has a dire vision of the sacrifice necessary to save the boy -- from what and for what, who can say?...

Valhalla Rising is stark stuff, its violence all the stronger (despite some poor CGI blood spurts) for being done on the scale of single combat rather than mass battle. The vast landscapes in either hemisphere are beautiful and dreadful at once, dwarfing the handful of actors trudging through them. If the boat ordeal reminds you of Apocalypse Now, the overall atmosphere is more post-apocalyptic. The object doesn't seem to be a recreation of history, but an evocation of man at the end of his tether. One-Eye's visions take the film into the realm of fantasy, but the fantasy is pretty limited in scale and scope. We don't see the Norse gods, nor do we get any evidence that Christianity has real power. So it's fantasy but not myth; the point seems to be to make poignant One-Eye's awareness of his fate. Mikkelsen's intensely stoic performance offers few openings for empathy, however. If we're moved, it's when we recognize the circumstances that will fulfill his final vision, why it will happen. His foreknowledge of his fate allows him not only to accept it, but to make an offering of it. The film's ultimate question may be: in such a world, what makes a meaningful death? That his final act is arguably the most Christian act in the film is an additional irony. Whether Refn could get the same effect without the selective spiritualism is debatable. Whatever you decide, Valhalla Rising is still an admirable effort with just about the right mix of grime and grandeur, violence and virtue. As arthouse action films go, it's pretty good.

TERRIBLY HAPPY (Frygtelig Lykkelig, 2008)

Henrik Ruben Genz's film took home most of the major Danish film awards for its year of release, and was Denmark's official entry for the Academy Awards. The box cover for the Oscilloscope Laboratories DVD touts the film as a neo-noir with something of the spirit of David Lynch and the Coen Brothers in it. It's really neither as out there as a Lynch film nor as stylish as a Coens film, but you can see how Ganz may have been influenced by them in adapting Erling Jepsen's novel.

Robert (Jakob Cedergren) is a cop who's been reassigned to a small backwater town for reasons only gradually revealed. Your typical big-city Dane looks down on places like this, apparently, where the people have their own peculiar salutation -- "Mojn," which can stand for hello or goodbye. It's one of those burgs where everybody knows everybody and they prefer to take care of things themselves instead of calling in the cops from the nearest city. They'd rather have Robert slap a little shoplifter around than have him file a report, and their preferred last resort is to put things in the town bog. There's a legend about this place that we hear as the film starts. A cow sunk in the bog once, then came back mutated. The townsfolk blamed it for mad cow disease and the infertility of local women. They killed it, put it back in the bog, and the problems went away. If they're talking about mad cow disease, that's a recent legend, and just the sort you know you have to bear in mind as the picture progresses.

Above, the bog. Below, the town.

It doesn't take long for Robert, after he flushes his meds down the toilet, to get embroiled in the local drama. Ingeliede (Lene Maria Christensen), the wife of Jorgen the town bully (Kim Bodna), keeps throwing herself at Robert, asking for protection from her husband one moment after he beats her, the next going home peacefully with him. Ingeliede is playing with fire, since Robert was exiled to this place in part because he pulled a gun on his own wife and threatened to kill her. He resists temptation for a while, but he gives in in her bedroom, with Jorgen dozing drunkenly in the hallway after another beating. When he hears Jorgen stir, Ingeliede screams and Robert panics. Before long there's a body to deal with, but the town "quack" tries to paper things over by calling the death an accident. The rest of the people in town don't buy it, but they blame the wrong person, whom Robert has to save from being forced into the bog, despite the person's own warning that "you're making a mistake." Robert probably should have listened....

Jakob Cedergren as Robert, the troubled "marshall" of a troubled town.

Maybe I was in the wrong mood when I watched Terribly Happy. I can't really fault the filmmaking or the acting, and the location work really sells the sparse, squishy desolation of that squalid town, but I also couldn't help feeling that this was an utterly generic film without any distinctive local character. The fact that Robert's job title is translated as "marshall," along with Jorgen's preference for cowboy hats and another character's John Deere cap only enhanced my feeling that this may as well have been an American movie, and that's not what I'm looking for when I see a foreign film on the library shelf. All the mumbo-jumbo about the bog and the quirky bits like the little girl pushing her cart late at night and the cat that says "Mojn" left me feeling that Ganz's movie really took place in "movie land" rather than Denmark or America. That may just mean that the writing, the direction and the acting weren't strong enough to make this feel like a new experience the way any number of equally derivative but more compelling movies manage to feel. Someone else who watches this may think differently, however, so I neither recommend it nor condemn it. I can't say I was terribly happy with it, but it wasn't terrible, either.

FLAMMEN & CITRONEN (2008)

If murder is just killing without a license, as Arthur Wilson says, that begs the question of the authority to license killing. In Ole Christian Madsen's film, the protagonists -- red-haired "Flame" (Thure Lindhardt) and sweaty "Citron" (Mads Mikkelsen) get their license from the Danish underground resistance to the Nazi occupation, and their boss, Aksel Winther gets his from London. With the pretense of a license come rules: the team can kill Danish collaborators, but not the German occupiers themselves. But one day Winther changes the rules and orders our heroes to kill three Germans, including a woman. Here Flammen draws the line; his personal code won't let him kill women. Citronen is willing but less expert; he wounds the woman in the arm but can't follow through. Flammen has to go in and finish her, but he has to turn her head away so he doesn't have to look at her face.

If it's open season on Germans, Flammen and Citronen would like to whack Hoffmann, the local Gestapo commander, but Winther places him off-limits. Meanwhile, one of the three condemned Germans persuades Flammen to spare him by declaring himself a member of the German resistance to Hitler. Winther calls Flammen a dupe and sends him back to do the job right. What is the truth? Does it matter? Is there a logic or a strategy to Winther's inconsistency, or are the targets chosen on an arbitrary basis? Or are they chosen with an ulterior motive? As they discover greater cause to question Winther's orders, Flammen and Citronen approach the moment when they'll authorize themselves to kill Hoffman or whomever their own sense of the national interest dictates. They begin to see themselves above the law in other ways. Citronen has a hard time supporting his wife and daughter as a resistance assassin. Eventually he decides to rob a collaborating grocer (though he refuses to take money from the register) so he can put food on the table and give his daughter presents. When he delivers the goods, his wife confesses to an affair. That's the sort of film this is. It develops an almost oppressive momentum; if anything bad can happen to our heroes, or if something can further tilt their moral balance, it will. Flammen falls in love with a woman who acts as a courier for Winther. Will she be a spy for the Germans? You'll at least be strongly invited to think so.

This movie, based on actual resistance fighters, grows in the shadow of one film in particular: Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows (1969), a film condemned in its time for telling a resistance story in the manner of a gangster film but rediscovered to universal acclaim in the new millennium. Melville's film is a grim, suspenseful affair in his characteristic manner. Madsen can't match Melville as a thriller, but he can try to top the grimness and place more emphasis on the ethical dilemmas confronting irregular killers in wartime. This he does quite effectively, if he does also go on too long, nearly to the point of overkill.

What Madsen does most effectively is question the entire purpose or relevance of his heroes' exploits. He duly notes the postwar honors conferred upon the real men, but the film itself leaves you wondering what Flammen and Citronen actually accomplished. The director expresses this most forcefully when he portrays the Copenhagen uprising of late June 1944. For once it looks like actual warfare on screen, even if it's only street fighting, but the thing you really notice is how Flammen strolls through the action without lifting a finger to help his fellow Danes. He's under orders to do nothing until he gets further orders from London via Winther. This is what World War II is supposed to be: people fighting Germans. But it's the sort of showdown Winther has been at pains to avoid. If Winther and Flammen and Citronen seem to be fighting their own private war at times, I'm sure that impression was intentional. In our age of terrorism, privatized warfare and the idealized ruthlessness of special ops, this side of the "good war" seems more relevant than ever. Leaving aside temporary relevance, Flammen & Citronen is worth seeing for anyone interested in the ongoing cinematic exploration of the enigma of killing.

The English-subtitlted trailer from IFC Films was uploaded to YouTube by rando14.