Flame and Citron

Bea says: Another seen as part of the London Film Festival, with the added bonus of a Q & A session with director, lead actor and producer afterwards. A super film, the likes of which are rarely seen these days. Strong, true-story plot of two WW2 Danish Undergroud heroes, beautifully written and characterised, great cinemaphotography. Film Noir with a modern twist; perhaps a little violent for some tastes, but it was how it was I guess. My favourite character: Ketty (can't remember her last name); double, triple, quadruple agent who died in Marjorca only ten years ago, never discussed the war and was clearly the informer on her lover and our hero Flame. The lead characters are portrayed with understanding but are frightening nevertheless, both in single minded determination and when in doubt and betrayal. If I can borrow a quote from the director to finish: "a tale of extraordinary people in extraordinary times".

*****

Cecil says: By a long way the best film I've seen this year. And I knew it would be from the opening scene (again, what is it about the power of opening scenes?). "Can you remember when they arrived? Can you remember April the 9th?" asked the voice as film footage showed German soldiers marching into Copenhagen all those years ago. And immediately, I was filled with that sense of foreboding and unease in my stomach, even though I was just sitting in the front row of a cinema and had only five minutes earlier been sipping a cup of tea...

There's something that always disturbs me in stories about the resistance during the war - it's close enough to feel like something I might have been confronted with in my lifetime and am only thankful I haven't been. But it makes me ask myself: How would I react to an invading force in my country? Would I hide away, suppress my thoughts and opinions to survive or would I feel compelled to resist as these guys did (whatever their motives)? They are questions I have asked myself ever since reading Simone de Beauvoir's 'Le sang des autres' where the protagonist ultimately doesn't have the courage to resist. All of us in our generation have the good fortune (at least - in our cases - in Western Europe or Australia) never to have been confronted with this dilemma and so none of us knows for sure how we would react if that situation ever arose.

But what was so powerful about this film? The characterisation; the doubts; never knowing who you can trust; not knowing who is going to betray you: people you think are friends or lovers actually being the ones who are deceiving you; the ones who appear to be the enemy (in this case Hoffmann, the Gestapo chief, and Gilbert, another prominent Nazi) actually being the most articulate and the ones who are able to sow the most doubt. And the slow switch in character between Flame and Citron, so that the Flame we see at the start (determined, more fiery, more able to kill) has by the end become the more uncertain of the two, while Citron (at first unable to kill anyone and clearly sweating with nerves constantly) slowly becomes the more determined killer.

The director told us at the end that Hitler had sent Hoffmann (a nice guy, by Gestapo standards) to Denmark, because he basically liked the Danes. And Hoffmann apparently mixed well with the Danish middle-classes, being a cultured and articulate guy. In the UK, we don't often think about Denmark in terms of the 2nd World War - or of neutral Sweden, for that matter. In our collective memory, we know about The Netherlands (A Bridge too Far), Italy (Ancona), Poland (ghetto) and for neutrality we think of Switzerland (and we conveniently seem also to forget Irish neutrality), but this film gives us an insight into the relationships between Sweden, Denmark and Germany during the war, revealing a whole new triangle most of us in the UK have not given much thought to.

This is a film I can imagine seeing again and again (something I haven't done since my real film-buff days in the 1980s)

*****