Hans Petter Moland 2014 Norway
Starring: Stellan Skarsgård, Bruno Ganz, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen, Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen, Kristofer Hivju, Tobias Santelmann, Sergej Trifunović, Anders Baasmo Christiansen
In the last year or so the nauseatingly titled heading 'Nordic Noir' has been attached to TV series', books, films and even briefly to Fair Isle jumpers even though it isn't an adequate description of any of them. The latest title to be handed this auspicious honour is Hans Petter Moland's In Order Of Disappearance, ostensibly a simple revenge thriller following the father of a slain (but innocent) man as he reveals murderous hidden depths in his quest not for justice but for retribution. In many ways it is just that, full of heavy pipe beatings, blood seeping from head wounds and brutal little details such as a dead man being wrapped in chicken wire so "small fish can get in and gnaw the meat from his bones, that way he won't swell up and float". Likewise a strangulation scene aims for sadistic realism with clucking tongues and vibrating legs before the victim is thrown off a cliff. But just as it surpasses the previous classification the film is so much more than mere brainless aggression, mixing in deadpan, coal black comedy (in one killing the blood spatter is blocked by a cardboard takeaway coffee-cup holder) and even repeatedly mocking the genre itself while presenting a more successful example of it than many of the frontrunners are capable of. There's also a great deal of visual style, not least in the knowingly ridiculous interiors of the villain's house that include chairs in the shape of twisted Phantom Of The Opera masks and pink confectionary boxes aplenty and the grand expanses of snow that fade into the shaving foam that middle-aged plowman Nils Dickman is applying to his face in the opening scenes. Next he puts on a crisp white shirt, the only break in the pure light a spot of red gently soaking through a square of tissue on his chin, a match for the graveyard in the periphery of the mountains he's just finished plowing. He's on his way to a ceremony declaring him as Citizen of the Year, a great honour considering his Swedish roots. His son isn't in attendance, instead he's in the process of being kidnapped by two men who overdose him on heroin, (incorrectly) convinced that he has stolen a bag of cocaine from them. After identifying the body (despite being interrupted by a clanging morgue drawer that refuses to be raised leaving the corpse at half mast) his wife leaves, unable to cope with the thought that her son was a drug addict and a crestfallen Nils considers suicide until that is his son's colleague (the real guilty man) arrives, badly beaten and asking to borrow money, and Nils' lip sticks to the gun barrel and the pain bothers him. As an alternative plan he declares war on the angsty gangster responsible, torturing and dispatching his underlings with ease although one tires him out and he rests beside the man, laughing at his own shortcomings with him before blowing his brains out. Playing Nils is the distinctly less than action hero-like Stellan Skarsgård, an actor I've been recommending to anyone who would listen (very very few) for a long time. In one of my favourite films of this year, Nymph()maniac, he played a character who was simultaneously the hero and the coward, the teacher and the student, the innocent and the corrupted, the potential rapist and the man. Here he's a believable everyman, fighting because it's all he has left and doing it well but also convincingly haggard, logically inept and, above all, deeply human, a quality often missing from performances in the field. Also notable are Birgitte Hjort Sørensen (mostly for how unbelievably underutilised she is) as the cool, steely ex-wife of the chief gangster, unflappable until she's punched in the face in one of the film's most disturbingly cinematic scenes, and the incredible Bruno Ganz, largely treading water as the boss of a Serbian crime gang who accidentally become involved. Moland is at his best in the comic scenes, cocking a snook at Tarantino by having two criminals on a stakeout sing along to power ballads, discuss eye health and muse on the correlation between sunshine and lack of national welfare, scripting Nils to criticise the glut of nicknames he's opposing (at one point he questions why an unseen hitman is known as 'The Chinaman' before backtracking nervously when he sees that the man is Asian, only to discover that he's actually a Japanese Dane whose real name is Takashi Claus Neilsen) and placing funereal intertitles after each death, both providing a laugh and marking the event as important. Equally the moment when the son of the lead outlaw, taken as bait by Nils, insists upon a bedtime story then asks his captor if he has ever heard of Stockholm syndrome acts as a hilarious interval between the general combination of violence and bungled masculinity. The lack of women (and the minor parts the two who do appear have) may be intentional but it still annoys - as previously mentioned Sørensen in particular has so much more to offer - and as a whole the film certainly isn't anything special but Skarsgård is compelling and as a piece of basic entertainment to indulge yourself with you could do a lot worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment