The Hidden Child (Tyskungen)

THE HIDDEN CHILD (Tyskungen)        B-                

Sweden  Germany  (105 mi)  2013  d:  Per Hanefjord   

Some footprints can never be erased.

Ever since the death of Swedish author Stieg Larsson in 2004, a highly regarded journalist known for investigating right-wing extremism, author of the immensely popular Millennium series that was published posthumously, and the first author to sell a million electronic copies on Amazon’s Kindle, Nordic literature has become extremely popular around the world.  Larsson’s heir apparent is Swedish crime-writer Camilla Läckberg, who has become the best-selling author in Sweden, whose work has been translated into more than thirty languages, including Tyskungen (The Hidden Child), first published in 2007, translated into English in 2011.  Swedish television is planning on turning Läckberg’s series of novels into twelve films, known as The Fjällbacka Murders, with two for general release, and ten 90-minute made-for-TV films, all featuring the same lead actors taking place in and around the Swedish town of Fjällbacka, (1,280 × 472 pixels), the author’s birthplace.  Tyskungen (The Hidden Child) is the first of a series of six episodes that were shot in 2011 and released on DVD (Camilla Läckberg - THE FJÄLLBACKA MURDERS | dvd) in October 2013, but the filming stopped when director Daniel Lind Lagerlöf disappeared in late 2011 while scouting out a film location for the third episode, where it’s believed he fell off a cliff just north of the village.  When he was presumed dead, Rickard Petrelius assumed the new director duties of episodes #3 and #4 of the TV series, while Per Hanefjord, in his first feature film, was chosen to direct the first of the intended international releases.  The Season One made-for-TV lineup looks like this:

Fjällbackamorden morden 1 - Tyskungen (The Hidden Child)  (105 mi)  2013  d:  Per Hanefjord, originally aired October 9, 2013
Fjällbackamorden 2 - Havet ger, Havet tar (The Sea Gives, The Sea Takes)  (88 mi)  2013  d:  Marcus Olsson, originally aired September 22, 2013
Fjällbackamorden 3 - Strandridaren (The Coast Rider)  (88 mi)  2013  d:  Rickard Petrelius, originally aired September 22, 2013
Fjällbackamorden 4 - Ljusets Drottning (The Queen of LIghts)  (89 mi)  2013  d:  Rickard Petrelius, originally aired September 29, 2013 
Fjällbackamorden 5 - Vänner för livet (Friends for Life)  (90 mi)  2013  d:  Richard Holm, originally aired January 2, 2013  
Fjällbackamorden 6 - I betraktarens öga (In the Eye of the Beholder)  (88 mi)  2012  d:  Jörgen Bergmark, originally aired September 29, 2013   

Claudia Galli stars as successful author Erica Falck, who has just recently given birth and whose parents are killed afterwards in a tragic car accident.  A few weeks later she’s moved into her parent’s home along with her husband Patrik Hedström (Richard Ulfsäter), when she’s suddenly surprised by a mysterious man in her home, Göran (Björn Andersson), claiming they have the same mother.  His awkward intrusion may be the actions of a stalker, a rabid fan, so she asks him to leave.  However, when the man is subsequently murdered a few days later, Erica starts taking his claim seriously, especially when her husband, a local police officer, confirms the DNA is a match.  So she starts making inquiries, delving headlong into an investigation of her family past where she’s forced to unravel mysteries that date back to World War II.  She begins by exploring her mother’s belongings, going through her diary, finding old newspaper clippings, searching for any evidence of having a brother, and interviewing several of her mother’s old friends mentioned in the journal.  What she does turn up is a Nazi medallion, consulting a local World War II historian who claims they were quite common in the region.  But as several bodies begin to pile up, all friends of her mother, the deaths suggest unfinished business connected to her mother’s past.  The intersection of her own investigation and her husband’s policework creates internal conflict, as her husband is worried about her safety, wondering if she could be next, and also doesn’t need police evidence compromised by her snooping around.  In most detective stories, the police may drive the investigation, but not here, as the focus of the entire film is on Erica and her discoveries, where the viewer is drawn into her search, which probes her own interior world as well, where undiscovered mysteries of the past continually haunt the present.    

While the film opens with a great deal of promise, given a sleek look and excellent production design, using a film-within-a film technique with flashback sequences back to her mother’s youth where a band of friends help each other survive during the war, but it is ultimately undone by an unending series of convoluted plot twists, each one more preposterous than the last, where it all gets so ridiculous after awhile that we hardly care anymore who did what or why.  While this may work in the novel, adding an underlying historical tension through a kind of memory play of the characters Erica interviews, but in the film all the twists and turns interrupt any rhythm or flow and have the effect of slowing everything down to a dead crawl, literally taking all the suspense out of the film.  The movie exposes hidden secrets, suggesting Norwegian collaborators assisted the Nazi’s in running the Grini concentration camp, while also suggesting there were Nazi infiltrators passing themselves off as regular citizens, some of whom collected information from within Grini while pretending to be fellow prisoners.  In this way, the Gestapo identified the leaders of the resistance movement, who were shipped off to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany.  When all of this plays out, however, suggesting there may still be a collaborator in their midst, someone with designs on keeping the truth hidden, rather than amping up the tension by unraveling the clues, it becomes all too predictable, told in a fragmented narrative structure where the secondary characters are never fleshed out but are only used in the advancement of the story.  That’s the real disappointment in the film, especially coming from a novel, as there’s barely any hint of character development, while history is used more for exploitive purposes than a natural part of the story, never really establishing any emotional connection to the past.  The most glaring deficiency is the copycat similarity to the Stieg Larsson movies, especially the historical treatment of Nazi’s in the midst, where the storyline follows the investigations of a journalist who is uncovering dark secrets of the past.  The success of the Millennium series movies, which were also made-for-Swedish TV, was largely due to the novelesque detail of integrating an ugly part of history into a detective thriller along with extraordinary lead performances, where tension literally fills the air.  Here there is wonderful use of local scenery, but the direction lacks the flair to bring any energy and life to this drama, making it a safe and stereotyped movie that actually feels much longer than it is, where there are no harrowing scenes, instead becoming a rather conventional whodunit that won’t surprise anybody.  

A Royal Affair (En kongelig affære)

A ROYAL AFFAIR (En kongelig affære)             B+         
Denmark  Sweden  Czech Republic  (137 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Nikolaj Arcel         

Official site

Anyone who has seen a Karl Theodor Dreyer film knows exactly what this film is about, especially the corrupt power of the Church which in the mid 18th century still believed in torture, heresy, and fear mongering, spreading vicious rumors to undermine any threat to their own power, creating such a repressive, punishment oriented society that they were viewed with disdain by the rest of neighboring Europe which was undergoing an Age of Enlightenment, led by radical free-thinking French such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau that endorsed individual freedoms over tyrannical and oppressive regimes, ideas that sparked American independence while also leading to The storming of the Bastille, which opened the doors of the French Revolution.  But while the rest of the world was enjoying newly discovered freedoms, Denmark remained entrenched in a corrupt monarchy run by the repressive regime of the Lutheran Orthodox Church which advocated tortuous punishments.  This is the background of the film, a kind of Danish Dr. Zhivago, told with the same epic sweep where a doomed and illicit romance is set against the backdrop of history.  Shot in ‘Scope by Rasmus Videbaek, the luscious visual composition along with the largesse of the natural landscape impresses from the outset, where one can’t help but think it’s been ages since Hollywood produced a movie with such a glorious look to it.  But of course, they’d need big name stars that would cost a fortune, any one of which would cost more than the entire budget of this film, as they’d never invest in anything less than proven star material, yet here the Danes have mastered the epic historical romance for a little more than $8 million dollars, easily making it look better than most $100 million dollar Hollywood movies.  That’s likely the reason the film is one of the 5 nominated Best Foreign Films, a gorgeous costume drama that actually has a superb story to tell, based on two novels, Per Olov Enquist's The Visit Of The Royal Physician, read ahead of time by both the director and fellow screenwriter Rasmus Heisterberg, but owned by a publishing company that refused to sell the rights for the movie, as they were looking to negotiate a better deal translating the novel into English, so screenwriting credit goes to Bodil Steensen-Leth's erotic novel Prinsesse Af Blodet.  What one comes away with after having viewed this film is the severity of the subject material, feeling positively Shakespearean, based on real events, one of the great stories in Danish history, all the more impressive the way these extraordinary actors make it come alive onscreen. 

The director is known for having written the screenplay, adapted from the Stieg Larsson novel, for the Swedish version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2009), much superior to the American David Fincher version, in my view, as it best captures the depth and interior strength of the characters, which is certainly the captivating allure of the immensely popular novel.  He has done the same here, where the film begins and ends with Alicia Vikander, who won the Swedish Best Actress Award several years ago for her performance in Pure (Till det som är vackert) (2009), playing Caroline Mathilde, a gorgeous and highly educated member of the British royal family.  Reminiscent of Sofia Coppola's MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006), her family has arranged a marriage to the young King of Denmark, someone she’s never met, making her Queen of Denmark at the age of fifteen, where the opening landscape sequences frame the horse-driven coaches and the royal entourage as tiny objects at the bottom of the screen, overwhelmed by the majestic beauty that surrounds them.  To her utter surprise, the man to whom she has been betrothed, Christian VII (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard), is mentally deficient, not overly so to the point of incompetence, but his infantile interests and crude, self-centered manner, subject to embarrassing outbursts, keep him secluded behind the walls of the royal palace where the nature of his condition is kept secret.  When they first meet, he has no interest whatsoever in marriage, but prefers the entertainment of watching plays and spending all his time with women of the flesh, enjoying a life of pampered decadence.  When it’s clear she has brains, talent, and much to admire, exactly what he lacks, he angrily warns her “Don’t steal my light!” as he needs to be the center of attention, with people constantly at his beck and call, where being King is more a game he plays, a theatrical role he relishes, while she’s called upon to display the aristocratic reserve and proper etiquette and manner of a royal head of household.  He sarcastically calls her “Mommy” throughout, as she’s constantly admonishing him for spending so much time in bordellos, eventually refusing to see him altogether, as it’s simply a waste of time.  While this is the surface reality, there is an ominous underlying tone in Caroline’s narration, where she is sometime in the future writing letters to her children, explaining the horrific circumstances as to why she hasn’t seen them.  These thoughts, however, are revealed sparingly, yet it interestingly provides insight into the present.   

Mads Mikkelsen plays Johann Friedrich Struensee, the son of a well known yet highly conservative German judge, seen as little more than a country doctor treating the poor at the outset, but we quickly discover he’s a bold and radical proponent of the Enlightenment freedoms, exactly the opposite of what his father stands for, so he keeps a low profile, writing materials anonymously.  His superior intellect and elegant manner, however, lands him a position as the personal physician to Christian VII, gaining his trust instantly by being able to quote Shakespeare, becoming his friend and trusted ally, though Christian views him as his favorite playmate.  Over time, Dr. Struensee wins over the royal court, having a positive effect on the King, who has fewer moments of outrageous instability, which impresses the Queen, who is struck by how he managed to sneak in censored books into his personal library, reading them all, quickly becoming intimate friends.  It must be mentioned that while the King is freely screwing every harlot in the county several times over, the Queen is isolated by duty and custom, raising a young son, but leading an extraordinarily repressive existence where she has little social life to speak of.  The intelligent conversations with Struensee feel like a godsend to her, a rare opportunity, leading to a scandalous secret affair.  This opened the doors for radical reforms, where the King, in a stroke of momentary clarity, literally dismissed the oppositional cabinet members loyal to the Church, allowing Struensee to craft new laws, eliminating censorship, abolishing torture, free labor, and the slave trade, while assigning land to peasant farmers, reforms that captured the attention of the rest of Europe, as if Denmark had come out of the Dark Ages.  When the Queen had another baby, however, almost certainly Struensee’s, it created a scandal and their brief window of freedom was coming to a close, acknowledging they underestimated the cruelty of the opposition, who began spreading vile lies and xenophobic rumors about the German’s influence, all designed to reassert what they claimed was their legitimate authority, eventually bribing their way back into power, arresting both Struensee and the Queen, sending him to the guillotine while exiling her for the rest of her life, but only after taking away her children.  While Gabriel Yared and Cyrille Aufort’s lushly scored music adds elegance and depth to the proceedings, it’s a riveting tale, told with exquisite detail, perhaps overly long, but the severity of tone is in stark contrast to that brief flurry of freedom and happiness where the doors are suddenly opened to a new dawn, only to be slammed shut again, torture and censorships quickly reinstated, leading Denmark once again back into the darkness.   

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO                     B

USA  Sweden  Great Britain  Germany  (158 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  David Fincher

Adapted from the Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy, a wildly popular series of Swedish crime novels that were published posthumously, the first part of the series was initially directed in 2009 by Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev, featuring a mix of digital video, 16 mm, Super 16 mm, all blown up on Super 35 mm, giving the film a variety of looks which helps set the series in motion.  The opening introduction is easily the most intriguing of the Trilogy, as it draws the audience into this smart crime drama where part of the interest is the individuality and unique intelligence in the characters, introducing the punkish computer hacker Lisbeth Salander with a near photographic memory, initially played by Noomi Rapace, and Mikael Blomkvist, originally Michael Nyqkvist, a top notch, award winning investigative journalist working for an issues oriented magazine called Millennium, where he has a longstanding affair with the editor, Lena Endre initially, replaced here by Robin Wright Penn, where a brutal streak of sadism lies underneath the cool veneer of Swedish sophistication, where only on the outside surface does life feel safe, secure, and orderly.  Despite the vastly improved production values and superb score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the writing and editing of this American remake are less impressive, losing some of the intensity and focus, including what was so uniquely original about it, namely the intelligence and strange sexual curiosity between the two leads.  

David Fincher creates a superb opening credit sequence shot to a cover of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song, which is a masterful film short in itself seen here:  Karen O, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross: "Immigrant Song ... - YouTube (2:51).  The Swedish title Män Som Hatar Kvinnor translates to Men Who Hate Women, quite appropriate to the story, a decade’s long murder mystery filled with particularly grisly unsolved murders directed against women balanced against an intriguing, off color love story.  The film opens as acclaimed journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is being sentenced to 6 months in prison for libel and is immediately whisked away from his family Christmas dinner to meet secretly with a millionaire business tycoon, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) on a remote island location where Vanger wants him to search for his presumably killed niece, missing for 40 years, insisting upon Blomkvist only after his libel case had been thoroughly investigated by an unusual computer expert, a young punkish Lisbeth (Rooney Mara) who has found no evidence of any wrongdoing, but instead everything suggests a frame.  Of interest, the niece always made Vanger a birthday gift of crushed flowers, and those gifts have continued to be sent from various corners of the earth ever since she went missing.  Vanger believes his is a hateful family, one of whom is likely the murderer with a sadistic interest in continuing the birthday reminders of her absence.  With nothing to lose, Blomkvist resigns from the magazine to begin his investigative work on the island. 

Hard to believe Rooney Mara as the rebellious and punkish Lisbeth Salander in this film is the same spirited girl in the opening conversation in a bar with 19-year old Harvard sophomore Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010), the girl whose blatant rejection of his crudely obnoxious manner led to his creation of the computer template for Facebook before the night was done.  Despite Mara’s best efforts, however, she’s no match for the harder edged Noomi Rapace who originated the role.  The American remake sticks closely to the original version except for a few exceptions, like the omission of a sequence of Lisbeth getting beaten up by a street gang, less time spent with Lisbeth’s underworld friends, including her hacker friend named Plague, and changing the focus somewhat, giving a softer edge to Lisbeth in the relationship, as she’s not nearly as aggressively controlling as Rapace, who adds more fire and inner rage to the character, more damaged and more ferocious, feeling much more uniquely revelatory and internally complex in the original.  Mara is following Rapace’s lead with the character, where Rapace’s physique is less feminine, built more like a man, where in the original story her biographic profile was blended into the theme of treachery against targeted women instead of spoon fed to the audience only after the fact at the end in Fincher’s version, as if to elicit sympathy, something at odds with the Lisbeth character who would never allow herself to feel like a victim.     

The secret to the success of this Trilogy is the fierce interior character of Lisbeth herself, an outlandish woman dressed provocatively in full black leather fetish attire, wearing motorcycle boots, facial painting with heavy black eye liner, looking boyish with spikes, multiple tattoos, a Mohawk haircut and piercings, a girl who never smiles or enjoys herself, who uses her brooding silence brilliantly, remaining one of the more compelling characters seen in years.  Her appeal lies in her own approach to herself, her reaction to the dark forces surrounding her, operating with utmost conviction, highly disciplined, fiercely independent, protecting herself with the feral quality of an animal surrounded by savage beasts, yet she remains balanced and in complete control of her life.  In the original, her startling sociopathic personality wins over audiences through flashback sequences to childhood including courtroom sequences that threaten to take control of her life, exposing a lifetime of fighting against physical and emotional abuse, becoming a righteous feminist vigilante, which makes her a sympathetic figure from the outset, where she initiates the initial encounter with Blomkvist by hacking into his computer and leaving him clues, steering him in the right direction, which leads him to her.  Fincher omits these scenes altogether, having them spend much less time together, delaying and prolonging the real tension and interest of the story, the glue that holds it all together, which is this bizarre but fascinating relationship.  Her computer and investigative skills at uncovering secret evidence are unmatched, so he convinces her to work with him in exposing a savage killer of women, where she ends up doing most of the lead work and being his guardian angel, actually saving his life from a reclusive family of demented Nazi’s. 

The dark and at times horrendous story is told with a brisk pace, advanced by clues, impeccable computer searches and interviews, but especially intriguing are negatives of old photographs which Mikael blows up and scans, becoming a movie within the movie, where they uncover unsolved murders, eventually leading them to various sexually gruesome murder sites across the country where something potentially connects to this case.  As they get closer, the inner circle of the Vanger family become more and more suspicious and paranoid, as they all appear to have something to hide.  The actual island estate is filled with architecturally stunning homes that are especially foreboding in the winter ice, with a few former Nazi’s living inside, men who have little respect for human life and will go to any extent to protect what they have.  There’s plenty of suspense and psychological tension in this taut drama, but something has to give, and when it does, it will carry the force of forty years of lies and cover ups, something dark, twisted, and repulsive, yet undetected throughout the entire period of time.  Noomi Rapace, however, is the real discovery of the Trilogy, and nothing in Fincher’s version matches her ferocity, as her hostile yet vulnerable character is shrouded in secrets as well, but she’s actually looking for a way to believe in something better, yet all around her she is held back by deeply disturbed and detestable men who have turned her life into a living hell, isolated, alone, but an aggressive force, even as she sleeps with Blomkvist, a man who senses danger with every move, that only grows more acute as he draws closer.  It’s one of these cool sophisticated crime fiction thrillers that’s gorgeous to look at, that relies on intelligence and a multitude of clues, where a heavy streak of brutal sadism lurks underneath the sexual intrigue between the major players.