Books, Arts & Manners: Plum Danish

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 Nex0 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 Nex0 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.

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John Simon

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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 Nex0 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 Nex0 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.