Flammen og Citronen (Flame & Citron)

My grandfather never talked about his time in the Danish resistance movement. According to my mother the most she and her sisters ever got out of him would be odd bits and pieces; a funny story about him and his friends going out in the middle of night to shoot a Nazi colonel’s beloved cat, which had been terrorizing the local chickens; he was seldom angry but once got pissed off at some people joking about Molotov cocktails. He had been too young to join the army when the Germans marched in on April 9, 1940. We don’t know what he did, only that he was involved and that many of the contacts he made use of later in life were men he had come to know during that time. They were hailed as heroes after the war, but few liked to talk about it. They would only come out and speak as a united front whenever someone would claim that some of the people they had killed were innocent.

The Danish resistance was unique in the respect that most of the victims of its attacks were not of the occupational force but Danish citizens, collaborators with the Nazi regime. Killing a German soldier would result in the collective punishment of an entire town, while killing a traitor to the nation was a murder less easily punishable but nonetheless significant. It’s estimated that the movement killed over four hundred citizens. The Nazis killed over eight hundred people suspected of being involved with the resistance, though this had less to do with the murders than with the bombings of the railroad tracks and ships that supplied Germany with food.

The most legendary of the Danish resistance fighters were Bent Faurschou-Hviid (known under the codename Flammen, “the flame”, due to having dyed his hair bright red) and Jörgen Haagen Schmith (codename Citronen, “the lemon”, due to having worked in a Citroën factory). Ola Christian Madsen’s (Nordkraft) film Flammen og Citronen, one of the most expensive Danish films ever made, with a budget estimated at $10 million, focuses on the two of them.

Flammen (played by Thure Lindhart) and Citronen (Mads Mikkelsen, from Casino Royale) were members of Holger Danske, located in Copenhagen and the largest of the resistance groups, believed to have carried out over one hundred sabotages and two hundred executions. In the film they are portrayed as hitmen, basically. They drive around from house to house, orders from higher up the chain of command in hand, walk up to the door, ring a bell and then when the door is opened, kill the Nazi collaborator point blank. They live in a basement and look worn out from their work. As the film progresses they get to know more people involved in the resistance, on both sides, and begin to doubt the orders given from higher up. Are the people they are killing really as guilty as their leaders say they are? And why can’t they kill the most obvious target, the Gestapo commander who frequents their bar, the man who is hunting them?

Both Lindhart and Mikkelsen are good in their roles. Lindhart plays Flammen as pretty stiff and righteous, but so might any twenty-three year old who carried out murders in the name of patriotism while being hailed as a legend. He walks around very snappily dressed, self-confident to the extreme it seems at times, but from all accounts the actual man was like that. His narration of the film sometimes goes over the top in the poetic-wistful department, but that seems to be more of a problem with the script than the actors. Mikkelsen meanwhile is close to a polar opposite, not having shaved for days, sometimes close to breaking down, and before I checked out some biographical facts I wondered if his codename had something to do with his constantly pained look. Even if this also seems to be a construction done for sake of the script – the real man appears to have been a little more jolly – Mikkelsen does an admirable job of showing the internal conflict.

The film looks fantastic. The visuals are lush, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen Denmark filmed as beautifully. The several action scenes are all well done, credible even, smoothly edited. The musical score is standard stuff, and probably the least memorable part of the film.

The main problem I had with the film is the script. It’s ambitious but perhaps a little too much so. As it tries to be a drama showing the conflict with a focus on the two fighters it also attempts to be a historical-, political-, action-, spy-thriller with some gangster episodes and a conspiracy thrown in for good measure. All that and a few tragic romances. There were many aspects of the resistance that could have been used, but showing so many of them makes the film lose focus and we never really come to care for the characters and story as we perhaps could have.

I liked some of the themes and ideas in the film. It’s interesting to make parallels between this and modern terrorists. It has some things in common with films like Michael Collins and The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

It’s a good, sometimes very good, film, but it’s not the great film it aspires to be. More than likely it will probably be the defining “Danish resistance” movie, even if I hope it leads the Danes to look deeper into this part of history before all those who were involved are gone. I don’t know what my grandfather would have thought of it. He would probably have shrugged.

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