STOP PRESS (10/4/2020): this performance is up for a short period on the Deutsche Kammerphilhamonie's website for free viewing. Paavo Järvi is offering a live Q&A on conducting Brahms on Saturday 11 April 2020.
There are few things more British than talking about the weather. What makes this play about a meteorologist interesting, however, is its historical setting: the eve of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.
It’s fascinating to compare this Norwegian film, which despite being Oscar-nominated (it made the Best Foreign Film shortlist of nine, but not the final five) has slipped out without a cinema release in the UK, with Darkest Hour. Set over a crucial few days in April 1940, it’s a parallel story of powerful personalities and their personal and political dilemmas in the face of Germany’s invasion of Europe. But the parallels don’t extend to directorial style; where Joe Wright opted for overly artful set pieces and CGI flourishes in Darkest Hour, for The King’s Choice Erik Poppe adheres to the Dogme school of handheld camera and minimal artifice, save for a few visual effects.
The film opens with a classic montage of newsreel archive giving the backstory. Danish prince Carl accepted the Norwegian throne in 1905 when Norway declared independence from Sweden. We see the celebrations as Carl is crowned King Haakon VII. Grainy black and white footage of the glamorous royals, graciously playing their roles as figureheads over the decades, is abruptly superseded by the Germans torpedoing ships in Norwegian waters in April 1940. Norway’s neutrality means nothing to the Nazis; Germany wants its coast for strategic purposes and the country’s interior for its iron mines. Invasion is inevitable and the king is faced with a choice – surrender or fight the Nazi war-machine with wholly inadequate Norwegian forces.
Poppe dramatises the next three days in painstaking detail. We cut between the royal family fleeing the city (pictured above: Haakon and the crown prince strafed by Nazi bombers), the baby-faced soldiers who are trying to defend them in the countryside, and the Nazi envoy to Norway, Kurt Braüer (Karl Markovics), who is trying to mediate with Berlin. The infamous Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who became a puppet leader under the Nazis, is heard spouting insidious commands on the radio, but never seen.
There are some great performances in the film – particularly by Danish veteran Jesper Christensen as King Haakon – and some powerful dramatic scenes that really capture the fear and tension of that time. Filmed in snowy landscapes or on deserted city streets, the muted colours and interiors are quite beautiful. Adhering to Dogme rules, there is a very minimal but effective music score and sound effects. It’s a refreshingly restrained war movie which focuses on the royal family, moral dilemmas and local characters.
But it’s a long watch and not without its clichés – as young women in beautiful cardigan-and-blouse combinations look anxiously at the uniformed men around them barking orders, it’s almost impossible not to have the Downfall bunker parodies come to mind. And while the story of Haakon’s brave stand against inevitable invasion is a cornerstone of modern Norway’s sense of itself as a nation, it’s possibly not of huge interest outside the country. This DVD release comes with unimpressive extras – film of the premiere in Oslo with reactions from pensioners, and a fragment detailing the effects used to create the navy explosions.
Overleaf: watch the Edinburgh Film Festival trailer for The King's Choice
The Great Man theory of history is applied by Darkest Hour director Joe Wright to his star Gary Oldman as much as their subject Winston Churchill. Oldman’s performance is the sole, sufficient reason to see a film in which little else finally lingers.
Even if Matthew Bourne were never to choreograph another step, he could fill theatres in perpetuity by rotating old stock. Cinderella, made in 1997, was the follow-up to his break-out hit Swan Lake but, never quite happy with it, he reworked it in 2010, replacing the musicians in the pit with a custom-made recording of an 82-piece orchestra.
Like an incoming artillery shell, nothing screams “Christmas is coming!” like another Call of Duty game crash landing on the shelves. The mega-budget war franchise makes more money than Santa at this time of year and just to add to the annual festivities, we’re treated to a grim recreation of World War II, courtesy of Activision's latest blockbuster.
The Second World War is central to our national imagination, yet it has been oddly absent from our stages recently. Not any more. Nicholas Wright’s new play, an adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel about lonely English women and American servicemen which premieres at the Hampstead Theatre in north London, effortlessly evokes the world of the Home Front deep in the middle of total war.
Danish director Martin Zandvliet brilliantly explores a little-known episode in 1945 when more than 2,000 German POWs were forced to clear almost two million land mines that had been buried on the beaches of the west coast of Denmark in anticipation of an Allied invasion. Many of these POWS were schoolboys who had been conscripted in the final year of the war when the Nazis were desperate for soldiers.
Roland Møller plays a Danish sergeant who has spent the war fighting with the British (he still wears Parachute regiment uniform). He now has the task of overseeing 14 German teenagers who must crawl on their bellies, inch by inch, over the beach at Skallingen in search of sand-smothered bombs. His loathing for the Germans who had occupied his country is palpable. His initial treatment of the young POWs is brutal – as is his exasperation with his superiors who have sent exhausted, malnourished youths to perform such a difficult task.
The film is beautifully shot by Camilla Hjelm Knudsen in desaturated colour. She uses mainly hand-held camerawork to portray not only the nerve-racking process of finding the landmines but also the evolving relationships between the POWs, a local mother and child, and their sergeant. There are a few atmospheric wide shots and the occasional aerial drone captures the deadly beauty of the beach (the historic location) but mainly Knudsen keeps us focused on the boys’ and their sergeant’s faces.
There’s something of August Sander’s wartime photography and even echoes of Rembrandt portraiture in the way she lights her subjects. Aided by subtle sound desigh and a skillfully deployed score, the result is wholly immersive. Slowly the Germans stop being an amorphous squad and become individuals, each with their own story. Slowly the sergeant evolves, too. Roland Møller served time in prison for assault and only became an actor in his late 30s but his performance here as the embittered sergeant is on a par with Mads Nikkelsen's best work.
Oscar-nominated, this Danish-German co-production caused considerable controversy in Denmark. The director was accused of being unpatriotic in his depiction of this moment in Danish history. Zandvliet (who also wrote the original script based on his research with amateur historians) deals with the complexities of post-war revenge and responsibility. POWs were forced to walk over mines, with locals picnicking while they watched them detonate. There’s a question about whether Denmark violated the Geneva Convention by forcing POWs to perform such dangerous work.
Originally titled Under the Sand, the only crude aspect of this extraordinarily tense drama is its punning English-language title. In its bomb disposal sequences, Land of Mine is up there with The Hurt Locker and The Small Back Room. Reminiscent of the work of Claire Denis and Michael Haneke, this is a great film about the chaotic aftermath of World War II and the moral ambiguities of revenge when the remaining enemy are the hapless teen soldiers left behind. The DVD extras include short interviews with the director, producers and key actors; more documentary historical material would have been welcome.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Land of Mine
When director Bruce Guthrie first gave me the script for Man to Man by Manfred Karge, I was immediately mesmerised by the language, each of the 27 scenes leapt off the page. Some are a few short sentences, other pages long; every one a perfectly formed fragment from a unique and potentially broken mind, flipping from prose to poetry. There are no stage directions, no character description.