Flame and Citron (Ole Christian Madsen, 2009) - Flame and Citron is a story of Nazi-killing resistance fighters in Denmark and is based on actual events (unlike Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, despite advertisements to the contrary). World War II is on, and the Nazis have occupied Denmark. Flame and Citron are partners in a resistance organization who assassinate Danish collaborators, whom they consider to be the same as Nazis. They describe their enemies in ugly, dehumanizing terms - Denmark was "crawling" with Nazi "vermin" - that echoes the type of racist language one hears in films about Nazi treatment of Jews, or in any story of a majority oppressing an ethnic minority. This parallel complicates how we identify with the supposed heroes, a complexity that only deepens as the story unfolds. The jolt of the first two assassinations we witness is thrilling, setting up a plot that would explore the moral quandaries around fighting Nazis through the murder of civilians (the primary targets seem to be newspaper editors printing Nazi propaganda and civilian informants). It's a promising start that ultimately gets bungled through poor direction.
The resistance movement is organized in a hierarchical structure with many moving parts that the film never really articulates with clarity, despite multiple laborious efforts to do so. There is a reference to the "Special Forces" and multiple train rides to and from Sweden for posh organizational meetings (these supposedly "famous" assassins are free to travel abroad?). Apparently the group is receiving orders from the British. Exactly why a native Danish resistance movement should receive unquestioned direct orders from the British is a question left unanswered, which is a major flaw, as much of the plot turns on this fact. If these are heroes are routinely risking their lives by killing Nazi collaborators and becoming local legends as a result, why on earth would they be tied down by shady businessmen?
Eventually, it becomes revealed that some of their targets may have been selected for less-than-pure reasons. By the time Citron declares, "We will go after our own targets," I had been wondering for quite some time why they hadn't already been doing so. If life under the Nazis was so oppressive and horrible, wouldn't it be obvious to all those in the resistance who the targets for assassination should be? Wouldn't their desperation cause them to ignore protocol (from Great Britain, no less) and simply attack those that deserve it? They are referred to as idealistic dreamers frequently in the film, but I don't buy it. That kind of characterization, on which the film insists, just doesn't jive with the story.
While it insists on their unlikely purity, the film, to its credit, doesn't allow them to escape with their hands clean. It makes our protagonists the pawns of a complex entanglement of wartime money-grabs. It is certainly an unromantic expression of the Danish resistance overall. While the subject matter is intriguing, the sensibility adult, and the morality nicely complicated, the film fails to be convincing, as it suffers from very poor direction. I've never seen a film in which I so often felt the camera was in the wrong place. Director Madsen's sense of spatial congruency is far removed from reality, which makes several elements of the plot hard to understand. He also fails to build suspense in scenes that could probably be cranked to 11 on the suspense meter. The climactic battle is the worst example of these problems. It simply doesn't make any sense spatially, and fails to draw the viewer in with suspense.
Most egregiously, it makes absolutely no sense why these two "heroes" of the resistance are allowed to operate so openly, and can continue to walk among Nazi Germans without notice, even after leaving eyewitnesses alive and well at their crime scenes. Its as if the Nazis and resistance had an understanding, that as long as the resistance were allowed to satisfy their bloodlust, the Nazis would look the other way. That street went both ways, as the resistance for some reason is unwilling to assassinate actual German Nazis. This is all very fruitful material, but the film instead bogs us down with a lot of undramatic exposition, and never really follows through on these ideas. The result is a bit of a logical mess.
Maxwell Anderson is an avid film watcher and blogger. He is also a freelance assistant video editor in New York City. You can contact him through his blog Ecstatic Text: http://ecstatictext.blogspot.com
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