Festival du cinéma nordique 2010 - Day 7

Au début, c'était bien (Der Anfang war gut /Alku Oli Hyvä/Off to a Good Start) is a documentary by Susanna Salonen, a very personal one as it tells the story about her mother and how she ran away from her responsibilities as a mother, returning 15 years later!
Salonen was 18 years old at the time and now she wants some answers concerning why her mother acted the way she did.
At the beginning her mother doesn't seem to think that her behaviour was strange at all, she just "wanted to get away from it all for a while". A while? 15 years?
She had married a man she met during her travels and moved to Australia and later on to Lübeck where Susanna lives.
Susanna has a sister living in Finland.
Their mother is a dreamer and she doesn't feel at home anywhere and in the end she starts dreaming of moving again, this time to Italy.
This film is very self-revealing and it's hard to understand how this woman, mother of two children, can disappear like this, sending a post card from time to time (calling her daughters her "small monsters") but not explaining herself to her children. It's by no means a unique story but nevertheless rather inexplicable.
If she felt uncomfortable with her husband is one thing but punishing her children like this, or at least leaving them with a lot of unanswered questions, is quite extraordinarily.

L'Honneur des Vétérans (Krigsseilerna med æren i behold) is a documentary (again) - director Eilert Munch Lund - who reveals the story about the Norwegian merchant marines who was involved in the war seven months before Germany occupied Norwegian soil.

38000 civilian marines risked their lives and some of them participated during the D-Day.
In total 4000 died during the war as a result of the risks they took when trying to deliver goods and weapons to Great Britain and other countries fighting Germany.
When the war was over, they were forgotten and when returning to Norway, noone recognized their efforts and when the soldiers were given homage, the civilian marines disappeared in the shadows, recognized decades after the war was over.
This reminds me of a group of undercover Norwegian soldiers/agents - the so called XU:s (X=unknown, U=undercover) - who during the war infiltrated the Germans and pretended to be nazis and sympathizers, taking enormous risks, subjected to torture, some dying under torture or being executed.
They were not given the chance to reveal themselves after the war, because of Norways Official Secrets Act.
This meant that not only had they risked their lives and achieved a lot during the war against Germany but they were for 50 years seen as nazis by their families and friends.
When reaching the age of 90 (or more), those still alive were restituted!

Le guerrier silencieux (Valhalla Rising). Nicolas Winding Refn. This is Refns latest film with Mads Mikkelsen in the leading role as the mute warrior One-Eye.

He is held prisoner for years by a Scotish chieftain but thanks to a young boy, he kills the chiftain and many of his warriors and joins a band of Vikings who at first are headed towards the Holy Land, then heading towards what they think is Scandinavia to fight the widespread Christianity.
They wind up elsewhere and instead of hunting Christians they become hunted by another group of people, in a totally different country.
During this fight One Eye goes deeper and deeper inside himself, trying to get to find out who he actually is and why he exists and if there even might be a higher goal to his life.
The little boy follows him through this inner and outer journey.
If the ambition is to make a film about finding a philosophy of life, through external hardship, leading to internal reflections and making this a combination of a 'road movie' and stalker-like story, I think Refn has failed.
It's a lot of rituals and using of different camera angles and photos of the nature in the ambition to make this as mystic and intriguing as possible but in the end it becomes a story of a violent man who more through these different external rituals than through real introspection make a final decision concerning his life.


Pusher 2 by Refn is - as I've written before - the weakest link in his triology.

Thomas is a story about a lonesome man with few friends, isolating himself from others in his small and very worn-down appartment.

Gradually we get to know him as a doctor who many years ago assisted his terminally ill wife in dying.
For this he was sentenced to prison and unable to continue working as a doctor.
One day he meets a man on a bench and they start to talk about everyday things and chess - Thomas' only passion in life - and one day the other man presents himself as the judge (now pensioner) sentencing him to prison.
From this point on the life of Thomas - and to some extent the judge - changes.
This is again a quietly told film with good acting and with small means huge questions are revealed.
Director: Miika Soini.


Total Balalaika Show by Aki Kaurismäki is a film about a special concert with the Leningrad Cowboys and the Alexandrov Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble in Helsinki's Senate Square in 1993.

70 000 people in the audience listened to this extraordinary concert filled with different kinds of music and a lot of humour.
A very charming, entertaining and well made concert film about a musical, not so common, cooperation.