THE PROMISED LAND / BASTARDEN (2023)

Superb fact-inspired historical, this award-winner is something of a Danish Western set in the unarable Jutland, a hard-luck territory where dreams of crop & settlers go to die.  Yet it’s the very place Ludvig Kahlen, a proud but impoverished military vet, swears to cultivate after he opens a tiny crack into Royal Danish aristocracy and receives the King’s commission to develop.  Plagued by few funds, poor soil and dicey weather, Kahlen also must cope with local hostility as titled landowners want him out; none more so than Frederik De Schinkel, a vicious sociopath actively plotting to destroy him, seize the land and force his German laborers home.  He’d already done it to the nomadic outlaws working there illegally.  It sounds like a worthy history lesson, a drab period slog, but it sure doesn’t play that way thanks to liberal borrowings from land-obsessed tales running from GONE WITH THE WIND/’39 to ROB ROY/’95, brought into play from Ida Jessen’s incident-packed adapted novel.  Stunningly produced (Nikolaj Arcel directs*), the film is less old-fashioned than old-school, with something of the heft, gravitas, tone & forward momentum of films made in the ‘70s by Jan Troell & Max von Sydow, though with more of a commercial flavor.  Note the use of smart narrative ellipses to bring it in at a lean 2'.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/09/utvandrarna-emigrants-1971-nybyggarna.html),  The exceptional cast has Mads Mikkelsen, hidebound & heroic, taming land, lord & ladies,  and deserving all the awards he won as the unbendable visionary forced to bend to survive.  With particular kudos to Simon Bennebjerg’s sociopath aristo and to Melina Hagberg* as a baby bandit, an unclaimed ‘Roma,’ at the time called ‘Tater’ which oddly isn’t short for potato in spite of that vegetable being Mikkelsen’s secret weapon.

ATTENTION MUST B PAID:  *There’s an almost magical match between the young Melina Hagberg and Laura Bilgrau Eskild-Jensen who takes on the role at fifteen in the film’s last act.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *In every way an improvement on the (already good) previous Nikolaj Arcel/Mads Mikkelsen collaboration. A ROYAL AFFAIR/’12.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/09/en-kongelig-affaere-royal-affair-2012.html