Ambition, epic and revenge, the grammar of melodrama is all in the film The Promised Land by Nikolaj Arcel, in theaters from March 14th with Movies Inspired, which takes us to the mid-18th century, when the Danish king Frederik V shows the mad desire to see cultivated Jutland's wild moorland so that it could generate new taxes for the royal treasury.
No one, however, dares to carry out the royal decree because the moor is a desolate and dangerous place, populated only by nomads and bandits.
At this point, Ludvig von Kahler (Mads Mikkelsen), a former captain of the Danish army, enters the scene and decides to attempt the feat.
And this is also for a good reason: to receive a noble title because he is a 'bastard' (Bastarden is the original title of this film), that is, the son of a nobleman and a servant.
In the film, based on the 2020 novel Kaptajnen og Ann Barbara by Ida Jessen, Ludvig, in addition to having to deal with the hostility of the moors, will have to deal not only with an evil landowner (Simon Bennebjerg), who will put the sticks on him in every way between the wheels, but also with the mentality of the time for the fact that he welcomed a little black girl into his farm who was then considered a harbinger of misfortune.
From him the former captain has, in addition to exaggerated obstinacy, also the closeness of a former waitress with whom he will start a family.
"It's true - explained Mikkelsen in Venice where the film was in competition last year - my character is ready to do anything to achieve a goal, he's an extraordinary man, but I can't say he resembles me. If, for example , I play Einstein, rather than learning something from this character I try to bring something of my own. This is the actor's task."
Nikolaj Arcel instead underlined: "The experience of being a father changed my point of view on things. It's banal, but it's like that. Since then, I started to see my past films and the way I had made them under a new light. While I remained proud of my work (or at least most of it), I realized that it reflected the point of view of a man whose sole purpose was to tell stories, but nothing more. The promised land - continues the director - was born from this existential realization and is, to date, my most personal film."
And again Arcel: "With the help of Ida Jessen's brilliant novel, my screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen and I wanted to tell a big epic story about how our ambitions and desires inevitably tend to fail if they are the only thing we have . Life is chaos; it is painful and terrible, but at the same time magnificent and extraordinary and we often find ourselves powerless when we try to control it. As the saying goes: 'Man proposes and God disposes'."
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