Pelle the Conqueror. - movie reviews

National Review, May 5, 1989 by John Simon

BILLE AUGUST'S film Pelle the Conqueror won the Golden Palm in Cannes and the Oscar for best foreign film of 1988. The remarkable thing is that, despite these awards, it is a very good film. This adaptation of the first volume of a four-part work by the Danish novelist Martin Andersen Nexo is roughly comparable to Jan Troell's magisterial The Emigrants and The New Land. Though not quite so brilliant and wrenching as its Swedish counterparts, the Danish film (which August intends as the first installment of the full work) is a humane, beautifully constructed, and gracefully executed piece of moviemaking, an unmelodramatic but touching tribute to the defeats and victories of lowly people, and thus the sort of thing that is least likely to succeed in this country. That it has already been playing for a while and may, thanks to the Academy Award it received, maintain itself longer on our screens is a heartening sign.

Pelle, a boy of 11 or so, and his aging father, Lasse Karlsson, a widower, are emigrants from Sweden to Denmark, where, to believe Lasse's tales, a boy's life is all play, bread is buttered, and a man like Lasse might even get Sunday breakfast in bed. "We must not accept the first job offered us," Lasse declares when awakened from his drunken sleep by Pelle as the migrant-laden ship pulls into port. (Andersen Nexo wrote his semiautobiographical novel between 1906 and 1910, but the action must take place in the 1860s.) Already with its opening sequences, the movie scores.

There is, first, the superb cinematography of the Swedish cameraman Jorgen Persson, best remembered for the films of Bo Widerberg, notably Eivira Madigan and Adalen '31. The way that shadowy clipper emerges from thc morning mists in an evocative slow dissolve from long shot to medium sbot against a grey-white background resonates with recollections of maritime myths. There follow shots of huddled emigrants on deck, then the hopefully rosy face of Pelle (Pelle Hvenegaard, whose mother named him after this Pelle) and the alcohol-incarnadined countenance of Lasse as he is shaken awake. A few brief shots, a bit of dialogue, and we are well into plot, characterization, and the populist ideology of the (then socialist) author. The director knows his job.

And forthwith the next glory of the film, its acting. Pelle Hvenegaard won out over four thousand other boys for this part, which he well deserved. He may be almost too good-looking, but he doesn't coast on that; he acts with an open, unaffected straightforwardness, as innocent as a freshly unwrapped pack of butter. And as Lasse, there is the hero of Troell's films (and of so many of Bergman's), the great Max von Sydow. One of the finest actors of this or any time, Sydow has the kind of face that is (to quote Martin Walser's Messmers Gedanken) "a door through which you can come in but not go out." That most elegant and well-spoken of actors assumes here a weather-beaten, bloodshot aspect and a drink-sodden, gravelly voice to give us an unforgettable Lasse: a pawky poltroon, self-deflating blowhard, poetic liar-a weak, well-meaning, foolish fellow, as likable as he is fallible, whom Pelle must, and does, learn to outgrow.

Take the scene of the landing in Denmark, with numerous prospective employers driving up to this slave market to haul away their chosen serfs. Proudly Lasse touts himself and his son, only to be told repeatedly-by those who don't just ignore him-that he is too old and the boy too young. Ever more dejectedly-and touchingly -he keeps telling Pelle they must not accept the first offer that comes along as the chaos around them thins out and the square is finally empty except for the hunched figure of Pelle, in long shot and silhouette, seated on a suitcase, around him a sunny cityscape and harbor view. One last employer drives up in a carriage; Lasse crapulousIy staggers out of a pub to meet him. It is wonderful to watch Sydow conquer his tipsy smile and titubation to assume an air of unsteady dignity. He and Pelle are driven to Stone Farm by the martinet-like Manager, there to work for the owner, Kongstrup, a notorious womanizer, and his wretched, loving wife whom he has driven to drink. Under the draconian supervision of the Manager and his mean-spirited deputy, the Trainee, the workers toil amid terrible conditions.

Covering just one volume of Andersen Nexo's huge novel, even granted the 150 minutes' playing time, requires the film to hop along expeditiously. August wrote the screenplay with the help of that fine Swedish writer Per Olof Enquist, and it is an exemplar of how to get maximum plot into minimum time. Even without reading the book, one senses the determined and dexterous technique involved in not allowing all- that foreshortening to foreclose on lucidity, continuity, and poignance. A subplot such as the tragic love affair between a rich young man and a pretty menial at Stone Farm is edited down to within an inch of its marrow (never mind bone), yet it works shatteringly. Again, the subplot about Kongstrup, his mistresses, and his suffering wife is handied with amazing succinctness and evocativeness: Kongstrup's last romance and its tragicomic consequences are told in virtual jump cuts, yet the pathos, horror, and black humor are all there; note how sparely and suggestively Kongstrup's final fallen state is conveyed.