Category: Europe

Cold Danish.

Imagine a festering, stinking bog, where old cars, bloated corpses, and sundry other sins and secrets disappear into the murk. The Dead Marshes? Try Denmark. I took a chance on Henrik Ruben Genz’s enjoyably bizarre Scandinavian crime story Terribly Happy (Frygtelig lykkelig) last weekend in part because of the very solid trailer, and in part because of this endorsement from Variety therein — It “plays with genre in a manner that can be compared with the Coen brothers or David Lynch.”

Well, David Lynch…not so much. (I presume the reviewer was thinking of Twin Peaks, but there really aren’t very many Lynchian flourishes here — There’s no Roy Orbison, red lights, flaring matches, or dream logic to be had.) But Terribly Happy definitely wears its Coenesque heart on its sleeve, paying brief homage to three of the Coens’ oeuvre in the first three minutes. The movie begins exactly like No Country for Old Men — a grizzled voiceover talking about crime and the olden ways, over shots of the strangely forbidding Danish countryside. We are then warned, a la Fargo, that this is based on True Events. (In fact, it’s from a novel by Erling Jepsen — Before that, provenance unclear.) And, then we cut to behind a police car on a long stretch of highway, one that pretty quickly conjures reveries of Raising Arizona.

Of all the Coens’ output, tho’, Terribly Happy ultimately feels most like Blood Simple — a sordid tale of small-town crime, seedy bars, and village ne’er-do-wells. (See also: great small-bore, character-driven crime flicks like One False Move and A Simple Plan.) This is not to say that Terribly Happy is derivative, because it isn’t. Rather, the film feels like it tips its hat to its influences before setting off on its own quite unique story. (In fact, Happy seemed unique even tho’ this is the third fish-out-of-water crime story I’ve seen in a row, and despite its reliance on the tried-and-true “new cop in an old village” tradition that includes Hot Fuzz, The Wicker Man, the aforementioned Peaks, and any number of old-school Westerns.)

If it seems like I’m just comparing Terribly Happy to other movies rather than talking about the film itself…well, best not to give away too much. But, in brief: Robert (Jakob Cedergren) is a Copenhagen cop who had a little bit of a breakdown, and has subsequently been dispatched to the sticks to rehabilitate his name. In the tiny hamlet where he ends up, people say “Mojn” like Hawaiians use “Aloha.” The village elders play cards all night long, short-handed. A local woman (Lene Maria Christensen) keeps showing up at the station with new injuries. The entire town seems deeply frightened of her husband Jorgen (Kim Bodnia). A strange little girl (Mathilde Maack) insists on wheeling her squeaky baby carriage around at all hours of the night. And people keep disappearing…

So, yes, there’s something rotten in the State of Denmark — more than a few things actually. And, as you might expect, it is Robert’s task to get to the bottom of it all. But in the Danish lowlands, the bottom can be treacherous, and our White Hat here is, well, not entirely stable, particularly after a beer or six. In fact, he’s the type of fellow who might just draw on his own kitty-cat, especially when it also starts saying “Mojn” back at him. (And, really, can you blame him? It’s only a short step there to “I can haz…“)

Sure, there are a few tells along the way — the last five minutes are telegraphed pretty much from the start. Still, Terribly Happy definitely takes a few jags I was not expecting, and the journey is the reward regardless. It doesn’t have the artsy ambition of The White Ribbon (and I have yet to see the well-regarded A Prophet), but nonetheless, Terribly Happy is my favorite non-English-language film of the year so far. It is, simply put, a solid crime story, well-told. (And if you get a chance, check it out before the inevitable American remake.)

Village of the Damned.


The kids are alright? Not hardly. As the second half of a Saturday double-feature with Daniel Ellsberg: The Most Dangerous Man in America, I caught the Oscar favorite for Best Foreign Film this year, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. Alas, meine freunde, I found it underwhelming.

Put briefly, and while adding a frisson of Funny Games‘ Aryan youths-gone-wild to the mix, The White Ribbon attempts to do for the rise of the Nazis in Germany what Haneke’s Cache did for the French-Algerian conflict. But, at least for me, lightning didn’t strike twice. Perhaps it’s due to either knowing the trick this time ’round or having a greater familiarity with the history at hand, but I thought the allegorical content of Ribbon started out rather didactically, and only got more obvious and belabored at the movie churned along. And, shorn of its historical musings, the story here doesn’t really hold up on its own — It’s mostly just long, meandering takes of (usually) unfortunate things happening to German peasants.

First, the story. The year is 1913, and in the (fictional) village of Eichwald, a German doctor (Rainer Bock) is thrown from his horse and gravely injured, apparently due to a tripwire someone — one of the Black Hand? — placed across his path. And before this event can even be fully processed, another tragedy takes place: A worker for the local Baron (Ulrich Tukur) falls through some rotted boards to her death. Yep, Eichwald is having a frozen run of luck like you read about.

As suspicions and recriminations deepen throughout this hamlet, more troubling events ensue. An aggrieved farmer ruins the harvest festival by slaughtering all the Baron’s cabbages. The Baron’s young son is taken by unknown parties and brutally horsewhipped (for some reason, and as in Doubt, nobody ever thinks to ask the kid who did this to him.) Fires are set, folks disappear (or leave while they still can), birds are mutilated, and, perhaps most frightening, even souls are in peril: For example, the son (Leonard Proxauf) of the local reverend (Burghart Klaubner) puts his eternal salvation in doubt by indulging in a nasty habit of onanism. To be sure, this evil must be beaten out of him, and his siblings, as soon as possible. In other words, we must destroy these children in order to save them.

Narrating this tale throughout (as an old man, years on) is the local schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), who, as a relatively young newcomer to the village, stands between its feuding generations. When not courting the Baron’s young nanny (Leonie Benesch), he watches the events unfolding in town with growing unease, and tries to figure out who is responsible for all the incidents driving the citizens of Eichwald mad. The problem is, he’s already tipped what’s actually going on in the very first scene of the movie, when he says something along the lines of “This is not just the story of a random German village, but the story of my nation.” Ooh, really? Allegory time.

Pretty soon thereafter, we are regaled with a scene where the Reverend’s children are taken to the proverbial woodshed and unduly punished for their transgressions, real and imagined. Given both the time I’ve spent on this subject in recent years and the schoolmaster’s “time to play German History Jeopardy!” warning in the first scene, this set off Versailles Conference bells and alarms right away, and especially so once these children are then forced to wear white ribbons as symbols of purity. Hmm…who else in 20th century German history ran around wearing armbands? Let me think on it.

The rest of the story pans out as you might expect. For various reasons, predominant among them the Sins of the Father(s), these kids go terribly wrong, eventually even going so far as to attack a developmentally disabled boy (i.e. the local minority in their midst.) Also, for some reason, the movie is constructed like a mystery, even tho’ — even if you didn’t pick up on all the hints in the last paragraph — one of the kids basically confesses to the schoolteacher what’s going on in the first reel. Uh, can we speed this along? Bitte?

I’d like to say The White Ribbon remains engaging despite all of its allegorical ambitions. But it doesn’t, really. When you’re not playing spot-the-German-history as it goes along — Is the Baron supposed to be Kaiser Wilhelm? Are we gonna get a Beer Hall Putsch? Hey, look, Pius XII! — Ribbon mostly just offers long, intermittently interesting digressions on agrarian village life, like harvest festivals, courting carriage-rides and the cruelest break-up of the German pre-war period. (Some of this plays a bit like Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven — A period film, told in period (B&W) style, with then-taboo subjects like incest, sexual assault, and the aforementioned onanism now thrown in.)

Simply put, there’s not enough story to sustain interest in this enterprise without the allegorical content that’s driving the movie. And, since this allegory was tipped in the opening half-hour, I pretty much just spent most of The White Ribbon waiting for all the various little Nazi shoes to drop. Without either the ambiguity or the open-endedness of Cache, I found The White Ribbon on the pedantic and stultifying side, and I can’t really recommend it. It’s not terrible or anything, but it is rather long and uninvolving, and I have to think one of the other Foreign Film contenders probably puts on a better show.

Last of the Kon-Tiki. | The Man Twice-Bombed.

“Twice he was captured and escaped, once by back-flipping over a snow bank and running off into the woods before his guards could use their weapons. A third time, surrounded by the Gestapo at a maternity hospital in Oslo where he had set up a transmitter in a chimney, he shot his way to freedom with a pistol.” Via a friend, Knut Haugland, WWII resistance fighter and last surviving member of the Kon-Tiki expedition, 1917-2010.

We may “play” Call of Duty nowadays, but this guy lived it. “He particularly objected to the word ‘heroes’ in the title. ‘I never use that word about myself or my friends,’ he told BBC4 Radio in 2003. “We just did a job.” Referring to the glider crashes and the killing of the survivors, he added: ‘Forty-one men were killed, and it could have been avoided. Because of the loss of life, you shouldn’t glorify the story.’“Update, and via several Twitterers: Also passing very recently, another unbelievable survivor of WWII: Tsutomu Yamaguchi, 1916-2010. “On August 6, 1945, he was about to leave the city of Hiroshima, where he had been working, when the first bomb exploded, killing 140,000 people. Injured and reeling from the horrors around him, he fled to his home — Nagasaki, 180 miles to the west.“

Crazy. He’s like a real-life Pariah for the Atomic Age. “‘I think it is a miracle,’ he told The Times on the 60th anniversary of the bombings in 2005. ‘But having been granted this miracle it is my responsibility to pass on the truth to the people of the world. For the past 60 years survivors have declared the horror of the atomic bomb, but I can see hardly any improvement in the situation.’“

The Great Flood…and a blow to the Annalistes.

“In a period ranging from a few months to two years, the scientists say that 90% of the water was transferred into the basin. ‘This extremely abrupt flood may have involved peak rates of sea level rise in the Mediterranean of more than 10m per day,’ he and his colleagues wrote in the Nature paper.” A new study suggests that, over five million years ago and with an event called the Zanclean flood, the Mediterranean Sea may have been re-formed in as little as two years. “The team estimates the peak flow to have been around 1000 times higher than the present Amazon river at its highest rate.“

Coincidentally, two years is about as long as it takes to read Ferdinand Braudel’s seminal two-part history of the Mediterranean. Cut to the chase, man!

Tant Pis, Henri.

“Although this is not yet confirmed, FIFA is expected to use a tried and tested formula for its finals draw for South Africa 2010. The system couples FIFA rankings with performances in the past two finals tournaments to create a group of eight seeds that also includes the hosts.”

With fans of Ireland still smarting after Thierry Henry’s egregious “Main de Dieu” handball last month, ESPN reviews the crop of futbol teams facing off in World Cup 2010. Here’s hoping the unseeded France ends up in this year’s Group of Death…and USA doesn’t!

We Band of Brothers…and my Gimongous Army.

“The heavy clay-laced mud behind the cattle pen on Antoine Renault’s farm looks as treacherous as it must have been nearly 600 years ago, when King Henry V rode from a spot near here to lead a sodden and exhausted English Army against a French force that was said to outnumber his by as much as five to one.“

Five to one? One in five? Nobody here gets out alive? Well, perhaps not. Further research into the Battle of Agincourt suggests the fight was fairer than Shakespeare would have us believe. “The historians have concluded that the English could not have been outnumbered by more than about two to one. And depending on how the math is carried out, Henry may well have faced something closer to an even fight, said Anne Curry, a professor at the University of Southampton who is leading the study.“

Mars Needs Women…and Men.

“The European Space Agency is seeking volunteers for a 520 day mission to Mars. The trip will begin in early 2010 and include 30 days on the surface of the red planet. The only requirements are that candidates must be 20-50 years old, in good health and no taller than six feet. You must be able to speak English or Russian and have experience in medicine, biology or engineering. You also must be a resident of one of the ESA Member States, which rules out Americans, but not our Canadian brothers & sisters.“

Down and Out in Paris or London (or Toronto)? Well, if you’re short of cash and heavy on free time, it seems the ESA is running a 520-day Mission-to-Mars simulation. Please don’t be alarmed just because this is how Capricorn One starts. “If you’re interested in volunteering, more information can be found here.” (RT @Joe Hill.)

How the Irish Became Euro.

“‘Europe has been very good to Ireland,; says Daly, the wine-store owner, who says he’ll vote yes for a second time this week…’People may be unhappy with the government, but to punish them in the Lisbon vote would be the wrong thing to do. Being a member of the euro [currency zone] is what’s got us through the crisis so far. I can’t see Ireland surviving alone.’“

This Friday, Ireland votes on EU’s Lisbon Treaty for the second time. “Support for the treaty has been hovering around 50% for months. In the latest national poll, conducted by the Irish Times last week, 48% of respondents said they supported the agreement, compared to 33% who said they were against it. But a full fifth of the population hasn’t made up their minds, giving the no camp the belief that it can sway enough voters in the final days to make the tally close.“

Shireland Security.

“A GCHQ historian, who would not give his name for security reasons, said: ‘JRR Tolkien is known the world over for his novels, but his involvement with the war effort may take a few people by surprise.’” By way of Ed Rants, it seems J.R.R. Tolkien was briefly trained in the art of code-breaking at the Government Codes and Cypher School (GCCS), and was even approached to partake in the Council of Turing in the fields of Bletchley, where presumably his linguistic skills would help in deciphering the Black Speech of the Enemy.

John, son of Arthur, however, took the hobbit’s route…this time. “While he didn’t sign up as was probably intended, he did complete three days’ training and was ‘keen’ to do more. Why he failed to join remains a mystery. There is no paperwork suggesting a motive, so we can only assume that he wanted to concentrate on his writing career.” Perhaps he feared the seductive power of the Palantir, or perhaps he simply had had enough of war.