The Last Sentence

Saw it at Busan International Film Festival(BIFF), and it was the most disappointing film of the weekend.

In fact Torgny Segerstedt's story, in which an anti-Nazi journalist became a political martyr, is quite fascinating. His relationships with women are also intriguing drama material. In addition to those good ingredients, the director Jan Troell had one more ambition: making this film as a journey to the mind of Mr. Segerstedt, rather than a bland and harmless biography. What could go wrong?

First of all, making a black and white period piece with digital cameras(Arri Alexa) was not a good idea; especially when you start your film with real archive films filled with gritty film grains. The images here lack any depth of field, resulting in images which are crisp and dull at the same time. The whole feature felt like a cheap TV reenactment of the actual events, rather than an artistic reinterpretation.

The script is not good as well. Without some fantasy elements based on a Bergman tradition, the whole feature consists of a series of important events in the protagonist's life. The timing is always off; things just come and go without proper investments. Most of all, even though it is based on the real events during World War 2, there is no sense of dread or grief.

Even though Jesper Christensen's performance was stellar, I cannot recommend this film. It is a film made with good intentions, but fails to live up to them.

4/10

I quite loved the movie in terms of cinematography - although rather slow at times. However I couldn't say I liked the character of Segerstedt, who appeared to me as a most spoilt, selfish and inconsiderate man. I don't even find him 'heroic' in the slightest: how much courage does it take to oppose and attack a foreign regime from another country? The list of Anglo Americans who went to fight (and lost their lives) in Spain in an attempt to oppose the establishment of Franco's regime is long. Those are heroes, not the verbally incontinent Segerstedt.

It was troubling to view Swedish director Jan Troell's 2012 film based on the experience of crusading journalist Torgny Segerstedt, so soon after the recent tragic assassinations at Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Segerstedt was editor-in-chief of one of Sweden's leading newspapers, and between 1933 when Hitler came to power and his own death in 1945, Segerstedt was a fierce opponent of Naziism, even though much of Sweden's leadership, including the king, was determined to remain neutral and out of the war. The struggle for journalists' right—some would say duty—to speak out despite risks to themselves and others has not ended. Beautifully played by Jesper Christensen, Segerstedt left himself open to criticism and to the devaluing of his motivations by his long affair with a Jewish woman, wife of his publisher. Hollywood's crusading journalists are noble and flawless (think All the President's Men), their presumed moral authority overshadowing any rough spots in their personalities, whereas Segerstedt's uncompromising character is pompous at times and unpleasant at others, he basks in his celebrity, and he's downright cruel to his wife. "Easy to admire, but very hard to like," said RogerEbert.com reviewer Glenn Kenny. Truth told, he loves his dogs best. Producing this film in black and white may have symbolic significance or may be just the preferred Scandinavian style—the film is Swedish, after all. In another Bergman-like touch, Segerstedt sees and converses with the black-clad ghosts of his mother and other women. Slow-moving, like the clear stream (of words?) against which the opening and closing credits appear, there is only a fleeting soundtrack to support the action. The film left me with a lot of unanswered questions. What happened with his writing? When the authorities demanded that a particular edition not be distributed because of its anti-Nazi editorial (which suggests they had imposed some censorship regime), Segerstedt printed it with a big white space where the editorial would have been. Nice. But we never learn whether he was allowed to continue writing after that (or how he was stopped) until a scene that takes place years later. How did the war affect the Swedish people? There's little hint of that, beyond putting up blackout curtains. It seems they had electricity, they had food, petrol, champagne at New Year's. It's primarily the awareness of Nazi behavior that the viewer brings to the film that explains and justifies both Segerstedt's simmering outrage and his country's policy of appeasement. He and his mistress both have suicide plans, if it came to that, but in the absence of any tangible, on-screen threat, their preparations seem self-dramatizing and almost childish. Segerstedt in a sense provides his own epitaph, which is also the Swedish title of the movie—"Judgment on the Dead"— based on a line from a famous Old Norse poem, which says the judgment on the dead is everlasting. History's judgment on Segerstedt would be that he was of course right about the Nazis. And if, as the King believed, it would have been his fault if the Germans invaded the country, he would have been among the first to die. NPR's Ella Taylor called the film "A richly detailed portrait of a great man riddled with flaws and undone by adulation."

The key to this film lies, in part, in understanding the meaning of the title. "The Last Sentence" is an ambiguous translation of the Swedish because a "last sentence" might refer to the last words a man writes. Instead, "sentence" here means the "judgment" one passes on a man who has died--a judgment that endures longer than the judgments that were passed on a man while he was alive.

And this citation of the "Hávamál" (an Old Norse 13th-century poem) has a special resonance in light of a toast proposed by Torgny Segerstedt early in the film: Segerstedt remarks something to the effect that we have a sacred duty to tell the truth in public matters, but no such duty in our private affairs.

Jan Troell has thus given us a portrait of Torgny Segerstedt as a man who fiercely refused to say anything other than the truth about Hitler and Nazism, but who, at the same time, was incapable of acting in a truthful and caring fashion in his private life--a man who seemingly had a deeper attachment to his dogs than to any of the people who deeply loved him.

And Troell has perhaps highlighted the shortcomings in Segerstedt's personal relationships precisely because he wants the viewer to sense this tension in the final judgment we place on the life of a man. Do Segerstedt's attempts to stir the conscience of the Swedes through his writings on the horrors of Nazism cancel out whatever negative judgment we might pass on his conduct as a father, husband or lover?

Maybe Troell poses just such a question because he himself may sense that he's nearing the end of his own life. And so what Troell wants, perhaps, is for us to realize that we are all faced with the question of the measure of a person's life and the final judgment to be passed on that life: what weight to give to the life one has lived in public, visible to all, or to the life that one has lived in the shadows (filled with love and affection or not) of one's private life?

Jesper Christensen with his Danish accent isn't very credible in his role as the Swedish newspaperman Torgny Segerstedt, famous for his uncompromising anti-Nazi stance. And could Jan Troell be any more boring director? Instead of making a movie about a man who stould up for liberty and against nazism to a great cost for himself, the director Troell just zeros in on his personal life and mistresses.