Mads Mikkelsen
, the actor who in Hollywood usually plays evil, such as in the Indiana Jones or James Bond sagas (
Casino Royale
), and has been Grindelwald replacing
Johnny Depp
in the
Fantastic Beasts
saga , once told us that, If he receives proposals from his home country, Denmark, he usually does not hesitate to accept them.
Well,
The Bastard
is one of them.
The film, a historical drama, reunites him with the Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, under whose direction he acted in
The Unfaithful Queen
(2012), and that is not the only point of commonality.
Both films are strong and moving, but
The Bastard
is also crossed by issues such as racism, sexual abuse and labor exploitation.
Mikkelsen plays the illegitimate son of a nobleman and a maid.
He is Ludvig Kahlen, a character who existed in real life, and who went beyond his humble roots.
As?
In the Danish army he rose to the rank of captain and was even decorated in the mid-18th century.
Ludvig is, above all, a man of determination, but also extremely proud.
A guy with tremendous ambition who puts forward a proposal to farm the barren wasteland of Jutland and start a settlement there, a potentially lucrative project wanted by the king.
Mads Mikkelsen composes a real-life character.
Photos BF Paris
In other words: he is a former captain who in 1755 is determined to grow potatoes on the king's lands, but in a place where aridity is everything.
The proposal is clearly unattractive, a lost cause, but Ludvig offers to finance the company with his soldier's pension, asking in exchange for a noble title and a property with servants.
Since the bureaucrats see no chance of success, they agree, thinking that they can keep the King happy without spending anything.
With his horse, a tent and a gun (to protect himself from the bandits that plague the place) and some tools to cultivate the hard soil, he resists the inclement weather.
The saying
Persevere and you will succeed
seems to have been written for him, because he finds soil that he can mix with clay to grow potatoes, a crop he imported from Germany.
"The Bastard" competed in the last edition of the Venice Film Festival.
But an enemy appears, the landowner Frederick De Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), a judge who treats his male servants like animals and rapes the maids, uses the remoteness of Copenhagen to ignore the monarchy and claim the territory as own.
A young shepherd (Anton Eklund) brings him a runaway couple, Johannes (Morten Hee Andersen) and Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin), who had escaped the clutches of De Schinkel, and also agrees to employ the outlaws living in the forest, including a young Romani orphan, Anmai Mus (Melina Hagberg), whom superstitious Danish peasants believe brings bad luck.
It is, yes, a western
The script, which adapts Ida Jessen's 2020 historical novel,
The Captain and Ann Barbara
, is incisive, and just as it pits the men against each other, it also charts the relationship between Ludvig and Ann, who go from master and servant to something else.
The Bastard
is like a Western, but Nordic, with villains capable of committing unlimited evil and a taciturn man, whom Mikkelsen, the actor in
Another Round
, almost always composes with sobriety.
"The bastard"
Very good
Drama/Action.
Denmark, 2023.
Original title:
“Bastarden”
.
127', SAM 16.
From:
Nikolaj Arcel.
With:
Mads Mikkelsen, Gustav Lindh, Amanda Collin.
Theaters:
Hoyts Abasto and Unicenter, Cinemark Palermo, Cinépolis Recoleta, Showcase Belgrano and Norcenter.