The depths of irony and black humor are obvious companions for whoever named this bleak Danish story "Terribly Happy," but that's for someone else to judge. Excellently acted and with a slow, stately, tension-building pace, we follow Robert, a Copenhagen policeman exiled to the small and lonely town of Skarilld for reasons that never are fully explained.
Once he gets to work, however, he discovers the usual secrets in a setting not unlike many American westerns. Think "High Noon" as just one of them. Most of the Danish secrets are swallowed in a huge bog on the outskirts of town, while the townspeople gather together to mete out their own form of primitive justice and seek redress of grievance, all in open, never-discussed secrecy. In some respects, it's an emotional relative to the recent German film, "The White Ribbon," an Oscar nominee.
Jakob Cedergren is excellent as Robert, the policeman, who rides a bicycle around town and is befriended by Lars Brygmann as the physician who knows a great deal and hints at knowing a lot more. The story grows around the Buhl family, Jorgen (Kim Bodnia), his wife, Ingelise (Lene Maria Christensen) and their daughter, Dorthe (Mathilde Maack), who pushes a squeaky-wheeled doll carriage through the silent town while Jorgen beats up on Ingelise. Jorgen is the town bully, and no one will challenge him, least of all Ingelise, who acts in a manner defining many beaten wives all over the world. At the same time, however, writer-director Henrik Ruben Genz leaves just enough room to make one wonder if this might be a family game more entertaining than Monopoly, or Sorry. Ingelise's play for Robert is a clue, and we later get others.
Robert is as taciturn as Gary Cooper, speaking of "High Noon," but he obviously misses his family, and the bleakness of the northern Danish landscape is beautifully caught in Jorgen Johansson's cinematography. And a drinking duel between Robert and Jorgen is another cinematic high spot that spoofs the American western. Slow, but deliberately so, well-made and worthy. Erling Jepsen wrote the original book; Genz and Gry Dunja Jensen did the screenplay.
Opens today at the Plaza Frontenac
–Joe