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Danish war film Land of Mine sticks with you after the credits
Thursday, 23 Mar 2017 11:37:21 | Jason Di Rosso
Roland Moller plays Sergeant Carl Rasmussen, who grows to sympathise with his young charges. (Supplied: Nordisk)
At the end of World War II, thousands of German POWs were forced to clear Nazi landmines from Denmark's beaches.
The Danes — along with their British allies — were creative in their interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, and referred to these prisoners as "voluntarily surrendered enemy personnel".
Half of them were wounded or killed.
This horrific wartime footnote is the inspiration for Land of Mine, a persuasive, humanist study of reconciliation that occasionally dips its toe into the register of high-concept thriller.
From a very early depiction of a rudimentary training course that goes horribly wrong, Danish writer director Martin Zandvliet makes it clear that many of the POWS — homesick teens in tattered uniforms — are going to die.
The subsequent experience is not unlike watching a horror movie where, one by one, cast members meet a grizzly end.
Obviously, the poignant aspect to this bloodletting, writ large in a film so connected to the tragedy of actual history, renders this a powerful anti-war statement.
Forced into this heinous task, the characters are like lambs to the slaughter. Their unearthing of deadly explosives on a remote, pristine beach evokes a metaphor of repressed traumas and shameful peacetime forgetting.
The story focuses on a Danish officer assigned a small group of prisoners. We meet him as he singles out a prisoner in a line of captured German soldiers and beats him to a pulp for taking home a Danish flag as a souvenir.
It's an effective opening, with the impressive lead actor Roland Møller — a tanned, chiselled forty-something — setting the tone for the film's exploration of moral ambiguity and even corruption among the victorious and apparently virtuous (a theme echoed when a young mother living close to the beach utters a casual, blood-chilling condemnation of the prisoners).
A slow thaw between the sergeant and his charges is always on the cards, but the potentially saccharine impulse for redemption is counterbalanced by a clear-eyed depiction of the military top brass who continually pressure him for results with cruel indifference to the welfare of the boys.
Nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, this is not a film that breaks into any innovative formal territory, but its story of innocence lost and humanity found is a strong one.
The image of these young POWS, who look more like boys than men, fumbling towards their death on white sand as the sea stretches to the horizon leaves a deep impression, as does the heroism of the man who tries to help them.
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