How do you best protect your home country when attacked by a monumental force majeure? By standing straight, and thus most likely to be broken at the first battalion, or by making themselves flexible and saving what is saved can?
Popular culture likes the first attitude, it is closer to the Hollywood view of conflicts, and the resistance to the Nazis has also been hailed in both Norwegian and Danish fiction (Flamman and Citronen, Max Manus, etc.), but director Anders Refn goes a different way, embraces the big picture, the one that also includes slanderous co-operatives, the betrayal of politicians and the fact that the tops of business shook themselves up in the war.
And so those Danish soldiers who voluntarily joined the German army when it was going to crush the Bolsheviks in the east, eagerly raised by ordinary Danish.
The cursed years are largely attracted to the wealthy Skov family estate outside Copenhagen. This is where the filmmakers paint the microcosm that will represent Danish society at the time of the occupation, and it is undeniably well-populated: Patriarch Skov himself (a gentle-eyed man, nicely portrayed by Jesper Christensen) his wife, their five adult children, the Jewish secretary , the housekeeper and her socialist son. And some workers at Skov's factory.
Today's Danes are apparently ripe for a revision of the myth; they devoured the cursed years that would be pilsner and blubber, and a sequel is thanks to it already announced. It was probably not fully planned when the film was clipped - in that case, you would not have had to use the dramaturgical shoe horn to squeeze in so uncommonly many happenings during the two and a half hours as the film goes on.
In short, it happens a bit well.
At Skov's family dinners , the Sunday roast is shared by a German friend, a saboteur, an adversary, a fellow runner and a daughter who have cut themselves in a German submarine - and they are all involved in various emergency events.
It gives a slightly fucked up story where some plot lines are left fluttering in the dense forward motion of the whirlwind, where we do not get to know anyone particularly well and where the moral dispute issues that are the film's foundation are all too clearly stated.
At the same time , The Cursed Years portrays the incipient naivety - at that time did not understand the extent of Nazi evil - and the film is undoubtedly captivating for the moment, as a melodramatic family chronicle can be.
And you don't have to be a nut to consider that Refn's creation portrays an extremely exciting and complex part of Nordic history.
Sweden, as usual, in this context, gets a taste for that premeditated Permit traffic and the few Swedes who figure here do not directly belong to the ethical elite.
At its best is Kalle's business partner, made by a Claes Malmberg who pasted on his slimmest manufacturer's mint; a sweaty chauvinist with a constantly half-open mouth. Melinda Kinnaman's short stint as a Swedish German Jew is habil. As long as she doesn't open her mouth. That Queen Silvia wrestling is not to play with.