Starring Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Mads Mikkelsen. Written and directed by Anders
Thomas Jensen. (14A) 100 min. Opens Feb 11.
Like their Canadian counterparts, Danish filmmakers have become so
obsessed with showing decadence and aberration onscreen that what once
felt subversive and idiosyncratic now just seems predictable and
forced: contrived, pre-packaged eccentricity for the Euro-arthouse
crowds.
As an audience of Dane-watchers, we've become too well trained. If it's Thomas Vinterberg (Festen), it'll be some incest-themed family drama. If it's Lars Von Trier (Dogville),
it'll be a coruscating three-hour parable about American imperialism,
acted out by three Down's Syndrome sisters raping each other to death
in an igloo. And if it's Anders Thomas Jensen (scriptwriter on The King Is Alive and Mifune), it just won't be very good.
The Green Butchers (or to give its wonderful-sounding Danish title, De Grønne Slagtere)
is Jensen's third feature as writer/director, although excluding one
interesting tracking shot from the POV of a human shoulder on a meat
hook, he does little more than follow the usual Michael Winner
dictionary of point and shoot.
Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Mads
Mikkelsen play Bjarne and Svend, two young rubes who work for a
dictatorial local butcher, Holger (Ole Thestrup). Fed up with being
patronized, the duo tell their boss to "sut mine rådne løg" (or as the
Danes say, "suck my hairy onions,") and start their own charcuterie
down the road. All goes well, until an accident in the freezer room --
but of course! -- results in the sale of homo sapiens on the menu, disguised as an organic chicken substitute called "chicky-wickies."
Kaas and Mikkelsen are both too good for this juvenilia, which Jensen rigs
with enough dramatic contrivance to make Thomas Hardy get up and blush. On the
other hand, one would rather see a thousand more
Green Butchers than
have Denmark crank out their own versions of
Foolproof and
Men With
Brooms. Now that would really be an aberration.