In the last three months, I have seen three movies better than
anything seen in the previous three years — better than anything
since
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days in
2008. One is Mike Leigh’s Another
Year reviewed here in February. The
second is Xavier Beauvois’s
Of Gods and Men, reviewed here in March. This
month, the hat trick comes with In a Better World — the
Danish title is Hævnen — by Susanna Bier, the brilliant
auteur of Open
Hearts (2002) After the
Wedding (2006) and Things We Lost in the Fire (2007).
Her latest film won the Oscar as Best Foreign Film at this year’s
Academy Awards and, as sometimes happens with foreign language
films, actually deserved it. In a Better World begins with
a scene set in Africa: a woman who has been cut with machete is
brought to a tent hospital in semi-desert savannah where Anton
(Mikael Persbrandt), the Swedish doctor who runs the hospital, is
told how the local “Big Man” — obviously some kind of warlord —
amuses himself by betting with his henchmen, whenever he sees a
pregnant woman, as to the child’s sex. Once the bets are laid, he
cuts her open to see who wins.
Then, at a funeral in Denmark, Christian (William Jøhnk
Nielsen) a boy of 11 or 12, reads a story in English, a fable about
a nightingale. His mother has died of cancer, and he is obviously
deeply affected by her death. Equally obviously, he is not on good
terms with his father, Claus (Ulrich Thomsen). “You don’t have to
keep saying stuff, dad,” he says in response to his father’s
attempt to talk to him about his bereavement. After having lived
with his parents in London, Christian is now taken by Claus to his
Danish grandmother’s house. I would like to have seen more of this
grandmother, but she remains a shadowy presence in the movie, which
is very much about men and the things that matter to men. At his
grandmother’s big house in the country, Christian is offered his
choice of bedrooms. He picks the smallest, least comfortable
one.
On his first day in his new school, Christian sees another
boy being savagely bullied. This is the slight, half-Swedish Elias
(Markus Rygaard) whose slightness and whose Swedishness, together
with what seems to the bully, Sofus (Simon Maagaard Holm), his “rat
face” and retainer constitute the latter’s grievance against him.
Christian ends up sitting next to Elias in class — both have the
same birthday — and this marks him out for sympathy from the
bully’s party. Significantly, the class teacher says to the
children that he is “sick and tired of fighting with you.” Merely
for talking to Elias, Christian is also taunted by Sofus, who is
much bigger and stronger than both of the other boys and who hits
Christian in the face with a basketball, bloodying his nose. Later,
at home, his father asks about the traces of blood but Christian
tells him nothing of what happened.
The next day at school, Christian again sees Sofus
bullying Elias. He follows the bigger boy into a restroom and beats
him bloody with a bicycle pump, then pulls a large knife and,
holding it to Sofus’s throat, tells him that if he touches Elias
again, he, Christian, will kill him. Sofus has to be taken to the
hospital, and both Christian and Elias are taken in by the police
for questioning. Both deny any knowledge of a knife, though the
police pretend to each that the other has confessed.
On the way home from the police station, Christian
explains to his father the simplicity of his situation, which Claus
cannot understand. “He hit me; I hit him back.”
“But with a bicycle pump?”
“I had to; he was bigger than me. If I hadn’t hit him
back, then everyone would think they could hit me too.”
Dad tries to explain to Christian the liberal view of the
matter. “He hits you, you hit him, he hits you again. That way it
never ends.”
“Not if you hit hard enough first,” says Christian. “All
schools are like that. You don’t know anything, dad.”
Elias turns out to be the son of the Swedish doctor,
Anton, in the first scene, who is separated from his Danish wife,
Marianne (Trine Dyrholm), another doctor. Together they have both
Elias and a younger son, Morten, but Anton has had an affair. Elias
is trying to persuade his father to get back together with his
mother. “Maybe you should get mom some flowers,” he says in his
childishly pathetic way. “Or chocolate.” Marianne says to Anton: “I
was proud of us, that we didn’t get divorced like all the other
idiots. That we loved each other.” Anton tells her he still does
love her, and that his affair was a stupid mistake. “I want to
forgive you,” she says. “But I can’t. That’s the way it
is.”
Back at school, we see the three boys, Christian, Elias
and Sofus, in the principal’s office with their parents. The
trouble has been sorted out, now, to everyone’s satisfaction, it
seems. The boys are all made to shake hands and apologize. The
(female) principal then smiles broadly and says: “We have all made
mistakes — and we have learned that no good comes from fighting.”
All three boys are silent. “Now, are you excited about project
week?” Christian and Elias are now acknowledged to be friends, and
are working on a project together. Sofus shyly asks Christian if he
wants to get together. Christian says no.
In the next scene we see Anton, back in Denmark to try
vainly to patch up his marriage, in town with his two boys. A fight
between the younger, Morten, and another boy over a swing at the
park, causes Anton to separate them and brings the other boy’s
father to charge up with an aggressive challenge to Anton. “Don’t
you touch my son!” he says — and slaps him.
“Aren’t you going to call the police,” says Elias to his
dad. “He hit you!”
“What do you want me to do?” says dad. “Beat him up?” —
as if the idea were absurd.
“Are you afraid?”
“That’s not the point.”
“I bet mom would love it if you weren’t such a wimp,” says
Elias.
Though still convinced, like Claus and the principal and
all good liberals that “no good comes from fighting,” Anton returns
to the garage where the aggressive man, Lars (Kim Bodnia), works as
a mechanic. There, in front of his two sons as well as Christian,
Lars again assaults him, but Anton affects to believe that it is he
who has enjoyed the moral triumph because he showed the boys he
wasn’t afraid. “It didn’t hurt,” he tells them of the other man’s
slaps. “It was all he could do, and he lost.”
Christian observes coolly, “I don’t think he
thought he lost.”
“But he did,” insists Anton a little petulantly. Little
Morten, taking his dad’s position, uses all the dirty words about
Lars that he knows, which further undermines rather than
reinforcing his dad’s dubious assertion of victory.
Christian appears to be quite without emotion about it
all, reacting instead as he did to Sofus’s tormenting of Elias with
a sort of cold fury. Of Lars he says that “he just walks around
scaring people and no one does anything about it” — and so comes
up with a scheme to do something about it himself: to hit back
harder as he did with Sofus. In this dangerous scheme the timid
Elias is inveigled to join him, though he tries in vain to warn his
father, now back in Africa, before disaster ensues. Meanwhile, when
Anton has returned from his Danish sojourn, Big Man (Odiege
Matthew) comes with some of his trigger-happy lieutenants and
bodyguards to Anton’s hospital with a serious infection in a leg
wound and asks for treatment. Everyone at the hospital knows and
hates Big Man. “Why do you want to help Big Man?” says one of them.
“He killed all my babies.” Anton answers grimly that he has
to.
It’s true that there is something just a bit contrived
about the thematic connection between Denmark and Africa, between
Lars and Sofus, the Danish bullies and Big Man, the ever-so-much
more dangerous African bully, and about the parallel questions of
what the well-intentioned, do-gooding liberal is prepared to do
about them. The “better world” of the title is, first, the utopian
chimera that such people create for themselves out of their good
intentions, the world where humiliation can with sufficient
ingenuity be translated into victory while children, who must live
in the world as it is and not as they wish it to be but who may
wish as fervently as their parents that their charming fables were
true, look on in bewilderment. But it is also Heaven, which the
Danish title evokes unashamedly, where Christian’s mother has gone
and which, he is afraid, is also nothing but a grown-up fable,
designed to comfort him with lies. The artifice of the comparison
is made up for by the fact that Miss Bier has no easy answers to
give but only an immense compassion, in which the viewer cannot
help but share, for the desperation of the need we all have to
believe in and hope for something unseen and
unexperienced.
