De forbandede år

I was looking forward to this movie. Its about a family trying to do the right thing to get through the occupation by Germany, as easy and painless as possible. But the germans, and the situation, keeps crawling in on the family.

My first issue is that you get thrown into the movie, and the actors. You dont get time to know them first. That means that for the first 30 minutes you struggle to find out who is who...

And my second issue that the family gets into way to much stuff! Damn.... Its like they are the whole war!!!

And then it suddently ends! Just like that! Cut! You search a little on Google and finds out that there will be a part two. And it will be released in 2022! They are filming it as I write this.

I watched this because I knew very little about the danish situation during the second world war nazi occupation. The story about the family is woven as a string of episodes only loosely connected with the major developments. Things do happen in the stories of multiple family members and others, but expected consequences of actions and what occurs are to a large extent absent and unexplained.

The characters of Jesper Christensen , Bodil Jørgensen and Mads Reuther make the strongest impressions of the Skovs with Gustav Dyekjær Giese and Sara Viktoria Bjerregaard surprisingly bleak despite strong developments in their life stories. All personal stories are quite shallow so it's hard to get engaged in any of them.

Unfortunately, the looseness of the storytelling inhibits the potential in the story, despite the possibilities a more held together presentation could have achieved. Therefore I don't think this is a film one must see, but the actors are not terrible and if the subject interests you it could be worth a watch. Just don't expect anything epic or spectacular.

So much could have been made of this. But what a dissappointment.

Starting on April 9th 1940, this follows a Danish family, and the friends, colleagues and such, of its various members, as they struggle through the moral grey area, the non-stop compromising, that can be unavoidable when trying to live your life in an occupied nation during a World War. Agreeing to work with with the Nazis sounds like tacit support of them, but what what if is the only way to to avoid having to fire dozens of people with families to feed?

While I haven't read the novel upon which this is based, I can say without a doubt that this is one of the book adaptations that appreciates the challenges that come with that. It manages to handle a massive amount of material, with over a dozen major characters, involved in a handful of different subplots(one could argue that there might be a couple too many), without simply ending up overwhelming. It does move very fast, and there are definitely times where you struggle to keep up with why this or that person behaved in a certain way, as their growth sometimes flies by and it's hard to keep up with it. There are times where it goes from one of these storylines to another too abruptly. This is definitely a movie that requires the viewer have a strong base of knowledge about Denmark during WWII. It is not going to hold your hand, and you are frankly going to be confused, if you go into this not knowing very much about that. The acting is convincing and these all feel like real people. You've known people similar to them in your own life. Some events are dramatised, yet most of this is credible and authentic.

This contains a little bloody violence, as well as brief sexuality and nudity. I recommend this to anyone who enjoys fiction dealing with the period. 8/10

Some films are weighed down by poor scripts, some by poor direction and some by poor casting. This and its sequel wasn't just weighed down but sunk by all of the above.

Working from a script he helped pen, Anders Refn showed there's a reason why he hasn't undertaken such grand projects earlier on in his career. Mostly known as Lars von Trier's editor, here Refn puts himself forth with a pair of hugely ambitious films - the tale of occupied Denmark by Nazi Germany in WWII.

We're thrown into the story just as the central and upper crust family's patron and matron are to celebrate their twenty-five years of marriage which, unfortunately, coincides with the occupation of Denmark. And so, what we get is a yarn; an attempt at telling an epic story of how this family is thrown into chaos by the events as they would unfold during the next five years.

You can tell the director's intentions were good; that Refn wanted this film to happen presumably for some time. Unfortunately, that didn't help him. Because what we get is a film from a script so overcooked and explicit it never feels cinematic or epic. We get constant breaks in whatever flow Refn does manage to stage. We get characters that are so inconsistent I at times wondered if they were meant to be different roles and where perhaps the same actor had accidentally played both. In one scene you'd see a character berate her husband for being too close to the Nazis, only for her to admonish another for being critical of the same nazis in the very next scene! It's so over the top amateurish that it instantly kills any engagement you might have felt before. And I say might, because it's very much in doubt you would feel all that much for the story or these cardboard cut-out characters. And even when characters aren't arbitrarily contradicting themselves from one scene to the next, they are given such poor dialog it's beyond embarrassing to watch it unfold! At times it feels like we're watching a first day rehearsal of a local amateur theater production. It's that hammed up!

There are actors in these films who've proven themselves time and again. But it's clear that even the best of them are struggling. Jesper Christensen is a wonderful actor, so it isn't surprising that his scenes are the ones which flow most naturally but even then, he's fighting a lost cause. The dialogue constantly rings false. Far too many things are explicated, far too little left unsaid and communicated cinematically - visually.

And it's clear there are far too many characters for this to ever have become a tight telling of what is a fascinating subject matter even all these years later. Refn constantly rushes from one scene to the next, from one character arc to the next without ever establishing why these people act as they do or why we should care. Characters move in and out of the story, some get killed off - I even caught myself feeling relieved as that might have left more oxygen for the remaining characters - others again seem to disappear without a trace or an explanation. So, we're left with this clunky break-neck speed. Start, no stop. Run, no stroll. Hurry, but go slow. There's absolutely no rhythm. Characters die, leave, fall in love, fall out of love, make choices entirely motivated by plot needs, and it all makes for a very awkward film.

I'm left feeling two things. Firstly, that Anders Refn is an editor and not a writer nor director, and secondly that this should never have been two feature films, but instead two seasons of 6 episodes a pop, each episode with its own tight story arc. That would have left plenty of room and oxygen for all these many characters to unfold and expose their motivations properly.

If there's one upside, and that's a stretch, really, then it's that Refn's strange choices mean we avoid one of those over sentimental paint-by-the-numbers war films there are entirely too many of as it is. However poor and awkward this film is, its awkwardness means we do avoid any Hollywood pretentions. I suppose sometimes that is, well, something.