Flame & Citron (Flammen & Citronen, 2008)
Dec. 23rd, 2009 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersSaw this at the Varsity with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
holyoutlaw last night. It's a WWII movie based on a true story about the Danish resistance movement -- specifically about two hitmen for the resistance (code names Flame and Citron) who specialize in assassinating Danish Nazi collaborators. In a lot of ways this felt like a standard WWII spy movie. As I said to Luke afterwards, "It's like Lust: Caution, except without all the sex." The focus is on deceit, betrayal, distrust, disinformation, the death of innocence/innocents, grey areas of morality. There's a neglected wife and a femme fatale. There's the scene where the Nazi villain tells the resistance hitman that they aren't that different. There's the patriotism in the face of certain death. (The latter is where Lust: Caution shockingly turned the tables.)
For all the familiar tropes, it's well done, and I wasn't familiar with the Danish resistance, so it was historically interesting as well. I think the most moving moment for me, however, came in the very opening shots, which are stock footage of the Nazis rolling into Copenhagen, with a voiceover in the second person asking, "Where were you when they came? Where were you on April 9th?" We don't yet know who the "you" is, so it could be us. The voiceover then talks about what it felt like to see the Danish Nazis come out of the woodwork. And it made me think: there would be Nazi collaborators in America too, even now. Which was a thought that hovered over the entire movie, as these two men went about cold-bloodedly killing collaborators, and then beginning to wonder whether they had killed the right people.
The film is very noir, too. Everybody is almost always smoking and drinking and hidden in shadow. I'm not sure how much spoken Danish I had ever heard before, and for some reason it sounded a lot more like English than German does.
holyoutlaw last night. It's a WWII movie based on a true story about the Danish resistance movement -- specifically about two hitmen for the resistance (code names Flame and Citron) who specialize in assassinating Danish Nazi collaborators. In a lot of ways this felt like a standard WWII spy movie. As I said to Luke afterwards, "It's like Lust: Caution, except without all the sex." The focus is on deceit, betrayal, distrust, disinformation, the death of innocence/innocents, grey areas of morality. There's a neglected wife and a femme fatale. There's the scene where the Nazi villain tells the resistance hitman that they aren't that different. There's the patriotism in the face of certain death. (The latter is where Lust: Caution shockingly turned the tables.)For all the familiar tropes, it's well done, and I wasn't familiar with the Danish resistance, so it was historically interesting as well. I think the most moving moment for me, however, came in the very opening shots, which are stock footage of the Nazis rolling into Copenhagen, with a voiceover in the second person asking, "Where were you when they came? Where were you on April 9th?" We don't yet know who the "you" is, so it could be us. The voiceover then talks about what it felt like to see the Danish Nazis come out of the woodwork. And it made me think: there would be Nazi collaborators in America too, even now. Which was a thought that hovered over the entire movie, as these two men went about cold-bloodedly killing collaborators, and then beginning to wonder whether they had killed the right people.
The film is very noir, too. Everybody is almost always smoking and drinking and hidden in shadow. I'm not sure how much spoken Danish I had ever heard before, and for some reason it sounded a lot more like English than German does.
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