2023-09-01 16:50:18
Some stories are like a wondrous seed being sown, and in the end completely different plants break through the topsoil. “Bastards” with Mads Mikkelsen and “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” by Wes Anderson are shown in Venice. The first is a historical smørrebrød western, and one so grandiose that this newly invented genre should be firmly established right away. Mikkelsen plays Ludvig Kahlen, the illegitimate son of a country gentry with a maid. Expelled, he becomes a captain in the service of a Mecklenburg army.
When he returns to Copenhagen at the beginning of the film, the year is 1755, he is a taciturn, hard man with a single plan: to regain the title he believes is his due. The method: convince the king to let him settle in the heath, an inhospitable, bandit-infested area. If he succeeds in establishing a plantation, he will be promoted to baron.
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Behind the scenes everything is more perfidious, more mendacious, more devious: schemers, opportunists, sadistic pigs, simple thugs everywhere. The landlords rape the maids and pour boiling water over fugitive servants until no more screams can be heard from the pit. Goats are slaughtered on the frosty pasture in the bitter winter. Blood, dirt or human flesh sticks under all fingernails. The pictures are big and cold like the land. “Bastarden” is the sensation of the young festival, a “play me the song of death” from Denmark, as powerful and touching as “Braveheart”, but without its hints of kitsch.
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The director Nikolaj Arcel shot “The Queen and the Personal Physician” with Mikkelsen in 2012. After a trip to Hollywood (with the Stephen King film “The Dark Tower”), he was fed up with the American film business. Too many people who talk into everything, fees too high, too little overview of where all the money goes. “What am I actually doing here?” he asked himself there, Arcel says in an interview these days. “If my voice is just one in 80, everyone has the same say as me, then what am I supposed to do as a director?” In Denmark he was again able to make a film that felt like his own: a vision, pulled through uncompromisingly .
This is also the story of Ludvig Kahlen, which is based on fact, but even more so on its fictionalization through a novel by Ida Jessen, a Danish bestseller. How the retired military captain gradually opens his heart and realizes that ambition isn’t everything reflects the director’s feelings back in America. It is essentially the story of Hans im Glück, someone who sets out to increase his wealth and in the end understands that peace and freedom are paramount.
The fast Mr. Anderson
A seemingly diametrically different film tells the same story, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, directed by Wes Anderson. What, another new film from him? The last one, “Asteroid City” just came out in cinemas? That’s right, “Henry Sugar” follows surprisingly quickly. However, it is only a 39-minute prelude to what will probably be years of Roald Dahl festivals on Netflix. The streamer has bought the rights to the British writer’s complete works for an undisclosed sum, rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. “Matilda – the Musical” with Emma Thompson and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” as mini-series will follow soon.
Anderson has admired Dahl since he was a child. In 2001 he visited his widow in the legendary Gipsy House in Buckinghamshire. Dahl’s quirky comedy matches Anderson’s quirky playfulness like one pastel suit to another. In Anderson’s trademark reciprocating theatrical style, a sort of folding picture book-turned-movie, “Henry Sugar” tells the story of a typical Dahl hero, a wealthy bon vivant whose only passion is to increase his wealth.
Benedict Cumberbatch in „The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar“
Quelle: Courtesy of Netflix
Ralph Fiennes as Roald Dahl does the overture, then it goes into his fable with Benedict Cumberbatch as Henry Sugar. He discovers a strange, hand-bound book in his father’s otherwise boring library (no detective stories). It tells of an Indian circus performer who, through years of immersion, learns the art of seeing without the aid of his eyesight. A doctor documents the wonderful case. Before he can publish the text, the visual artist dies.
Henry Sugar is intrigued. He wants to be able to do that too. Finally his life has a purpose. However, he is not aiming for yogic L’art pour l’art, but just wants to read the blackjack cards in the casino – without revealing them. With this simple method, he thinks, he should become the richest person in the world in no time. Then everything turns out differently, with its own “Hans im Glück” punch line.
The whole thing is, a guarantee at Dahl, very funny. The ensemble – Ben Kingsley plays alongside Cumberbatch and Fiennes – is brilliant as usual, the stage design and costumes are a miracle in their own right. London bachelor pads instantly turn into Indian doctor’s surgeries and deep jungles. Wes Anderson-despisers will hardly be charmed by the finger exercise. His fans, on the other hand, can tune in when Netflix puts the little film online in October.
What remains is the curious coincidence of two stories that are essentially the same. In “Bastarden” realistic potatoes grow from it, in “Henry Sugar” the craziest nonsense. That money and ambition aren’t everything, if they lack purpose and love, may end up being nothing is an eternal lesson. In the present, which sees prosperity long believed to be dwindling, it is falling on fertile ground.
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