Essential World Cinema: Top 5 Danish Films

When people talk about Scandinavian cinema, Sweden is usually the first name to come up.

Between Ingmar Bergman, girls with dragon tattoos and which right one to let in, there’s plenty of prominent influence to talk about. Denmark is a different story, whilst Danish crime dramas like The Bridge have been enjoying an upturn in popularity amongst Guardian readers and people who do all their grocery shopping at M&S, talk of their cinema always tends to get drawn towards the pulsating attention magnet that is Lars Von Trier. Elsewhere Danish talent is most well known during the away games, Nicholas Windig Refn migrated to the UK before blowing our minds with Bronson, then hopped over to the states and did the same with Drive, visionary documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer decided to tell a deeply important Indonesian story with The Act of Killing and big-time Danish actors like Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau occupy their time on American TV with cannibalism and incest (not at the same time) in Hannibal and Game of Thrones respectively.

All this talent had to germinate somewhere though and there is an absolute goldmine of outstanding, essential Danish cinema to be enjoyed. It’s difficult to single just 5 Danish films out, but here are the ones I find to be the most significant.

 

Day of Wrath

Gothic horror and Scandinavia just seem to go hand-in-hand, Norway is apparently crawling with trolls (no, really, even their former Prime Minister said so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jBuNMHzqmI) and a fairly substantial contingent of their music is supplied by genuine devil worshippers who like to murder each other during their downtime. Hardly surprising really in a part of the world that is often subject to perpetual night. Carl Dreyer is one of those film directors who should really be so much more revered than he is, being that he was responsible for some of the most haunting horror films to emerge before Hollywood’s golden era. For my money his most significant of these remains 1943’s Day of Wrath, one of the first films to really tackle the subject of witch-hunting in a morally complex way.

It follows the exploits of a pastor’s family, nestled in some rural 17^th century backwater. The pastor has recently taken a young wife, who harbors a suspected witch in their home only to discover that the pastor previously pardoned her own mother of the same accusation in order to better his chances of marrying her. From there the film slowly unfolds into an ominous exploration of hatred, paranoia and death. It makes for very uncomfortable watching and you really have to bear with it at times, but the fact that it even exists is something of a marvel. Only about 20 years previous a documentary called Häxan (Danish for ‘the witches’) was practically talking about witchcraft like it was still an actual thing. There’s also a lot of resonance between Day of Wrath and what Danish Jews underwent during the Nazi occupation and similarities between it and Arthur Miller’s McCarthyist allegory The Crucible are far from coincidental.

This is as much an essential film as it is a piece of history and however plodding and antiquated it might be, you won’t forget it in a hurry.

 

The Idiots

Lars Von Trier is a difficult man to pin down. Starting out as an up-and-coming director with a knack for creating films with real visual flair, he’s since become something of a rebel without a cause. The first sign of trouble was when his striking war film Europa didn’t win the grand prize at Cannes, causing him to storm out in a huff. Things got worse when he gave rise to the Dogme 95 movement by blustering into a French cinema conference and hurling leaflets everywhere in a tantrum as befuddling as it was impotent. It’d certainly make life a lot easier if he was a complete hack but annoyingly he’s actually quite good. As arbitrary as the Dogme 95 movement was (essentially a set of parameters designed to defy cinematic aesthetic conventions and leave only the story to do the work), some truly excellent films came out of it.

Since he spends so much of his time working in other languages and in other countries, there isn’t much of Von Trier’s work that can be characterized as Danish, but The Idiots is, it’s also the film that best frames the Dogme movement. It’s a film that seems to be setting out to offend people and little else at first, a group of pseudo anarchists (or something like that) group together and go around making middle class people uncomfortable by pretending to be mentally disabled (or ‘spazzing’ as they call it) in public settings like museums, restaurants and swimming pools. A young, clearly very damaged woman named Karen is caught up with the band and follows them through a series of deeply bizarre escapades. It could and probably should be nothing more than willfully offensive, soulless drivel but there’s a far deeper understanding behind it, the characters are interesting, they all have complex reasons for involving themselves in such unusual activities and the film never shies away from analyzing them or questioning their own assumptions. At one stage they involve one of their group with a biker gang, perhaps expecting them to become violent or dismissive but they ultimately turn out to be nice, agreeable people. I won’t pretend it’s an easy film to enjoy, the bare bones style may bother some and the orgy scene might seem tame compared to Von Trier’s more recent Nymphomaniac but it’d still be fairly awkward to watch with company.

Scratch the abrasive surface though and there’s real dramatic brilliance, not least during the heartbreaking ending.

 

Pusher II

Before the brutal honesty of Bronson, the hyper-gory 80s romanticism of Drive, the ethereal dreamscape of Valhalla Rising and the “WHAT THE FUCK AM I WATCHING” of Only God Forgives, Nicholas Windig Refn kick started his directorial career with the Pusher trilogy, a series of gritty, powerful films about life in midst of organized crime in Copenhagen. This entry really accounts for the entire trilogy, but the second is the strongest entry and you don’t necessarily have to watch them in order, since each story is entirely self-contained. This one follows lay about reprobate named Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen) just after his release from a short prison stint, he’s in debt to the wrong people so he goes straight to his father, a prominent gangster, to get work boosting cars. A dark, foreboding tale of drugs, money and violence begins to unfold from this simple set-up involving colourful characters like the enforcer simply known as Ø and the down-on-his-luck dealer, Kurt the Cunt.

Framed within this though is a far more powerful story that concerns itself with responsibility and integrity, Tonny appears at the beginning of the film (as he did during his brief appearance in the first one) to be nothing more than a hedonistic idiot but the depth to which his character is expanded and explored is extremely compelling. That same essence flows through all the Pusher films, although they’re built around drugs and violence they are far more concerned with the humanity of those involved than the actual work that they do and Mikkelsen provides us with the most potent leading man of the three (not that Kim Bodnia and Zlatko Burić don’t also impress in their respective entries). I would honestly say that Windig Refn will end up ranking as one of the greatest directors of all-time, the fact that he was a mere 25 when he started making these only bolsters that claim.

 

Pelle the Conqueror

You might not be versed in the history of Denmark and Sweden (neither was I until I saw this film) but at the turn of the 20^th century, Swedish migrant workers fled to the newly industrialized Denmark in their droves to escape famine and find a new home in lands more fertile.

This is the framing for Bille August’s adaptation of the lauded 1910 novel by Martin Andersen Nexø. The Swedish migrant workers in question are Lasse (Max von Sydow) and his son Pelle (Pelle Hvenegaard), who struggle to find work due to Lasse’s age, but are eventually picked up to work on a large farm on the island of Bornholm. It’s bleak, properly bleak, the work is backbreaking, Pelle is bullied by his peers, his work masters and even his teacher and the Swedish workers are faced by a volatile schism between themselves and the territorial Danes. Lasse doesn’t take any issue with this, he’s being put out to pasture, too old to travel or father any more children, he’s just looking for a place to work away his final years, which places the young, ambitious Pelle in a bit of a bind. The film clocks four long seasons of hard work and dashed ambition as a means of escape fades ever further from Pelle’s grasp. Despite the desolate nature of the plot, it’s a vast, sweeping film that was vital to the expansion of the Danish film industry when it came out in 1987, winning Palm D’Or at Cannes and the Oscar for best foreign language film. Max von Sydow was also nominated for best actor but lost out to Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (which, you know, fair enough). Sydow is more well known now for playing villains and doing a pretty excellent job of it, he’s fantastic in Shutter Island and equally so in Minority Report but this remains his magnum opus, he carries this role with a kind of sad, boozy, hopeless naiveté that tugs at you more and more as the film progresses and his relationship with Pelle is fascinating.

This is a really epic, striking film and as unhurried as it is, the heart and poignancy and the core of it keep you engaged from beginning to end, it’s a masterpiece of emotional weight.

 

The Hunt

There are films you love and films you hate and then there are those films that you love, because they fill you with frenzied, murderous rage. Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt is one of these.

Vinterberg was another player in the Dogme 95 movement and produced what is probably the best film to have come out of it, Festen, a film about a family gathering that turns very, very ugly when accusations of sexual abuse are levied. It’s a harsh, biting tale but in my opinion it pales in comparison to The Hunt, similar in context as they are. The Hunt is one of those films that you just have to see, it’s an important piece of cinema in every regard. Set in a small, wholesome Danish village that looks like it belongs on the cover of a Christmas biscuit tin, it follows Lucas (played once again by Magnificent Mads) an ex-teacher who is working at a nursery school to make ends meet. He’s a well-liked man, a prominent member of the hunting club, surrounded by close friends and entering into a relationship with an Eastern European co-worker. He’s not without his issues, the main one being his painstaking attempts to regain custody of his teenaged son after a messy divorce, but that seems almost trivial compared to what happens next. A series of unfortunate events lead to a situation wherein Klara, his best friend’s daughter unwittingly and falsely claims that Lucas sexually abused her. Almost immediately afterwards thing spiral hopelessly out of control, the nursery leader handles the situation very poorly and Klara becomes complicit in a falsehood because she’s too frightened to admit she was lying, even when she ultimately does tell the truth the adults are too far gone to believe her, chocking it up instead to shellshock. It’s a truly enveloping story about the darkness lurking beneath a friendly exterior, about what people want to believe and what they are capable of.

Witches are a running theme of Danish folklore and this is a film about a contemporary witch-hunt, it couldn’t have come out at a more appropriate time (2012), there are real-life stories of falsely accused pedophiles that have come about in recent years, it’s a gruesome, imposing premise. Drama that really disturbs takes comfortable, familiar touchstones and turns them inwards and The Hunt does exactly that, Lucas’s closest friends turn on him like piranhas and their hysterical behavior moves from hostility to outright sadism, it’s excruciating to watch. Even if you only watch it through your fingers, it just demands to be seen, it’s a beautifully hideous examination of human nature that throws into question the consequences of condemnation. It’s the kind of story that nobody wants to hear but also one that really does need to be told, an ugly truth, an unwelcome message.

If you’re anything like me you’ll spend half the movie seething at the way these characters behave, but you’ll come away captivated, haunted and utterly shattered. See it.