Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 3:02 pm 
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PILOU ASBAEK in HIJACKING

Negotiations with modern pirates

Danish director Tobias Lindholm (who has worked with Thomas Vinterberg on a lot of writing, including the admired 2012 Mads Mikkelsen film The Hunt and penned the "Borgen" TV series) gives us in Hijacking an intense process-story based on a real events -- several recent hijackings of Danish ships by Somali pirates. About to head home, the Danish cargo ship MV Rozen is seized in the Indian Ocean. But in the film, the actual moment of the hyjacking is bypassed. Instead the film begins by establishing ship's cook Mikkel Hartmann (Pilou Asbæk) as a warm and human guy with wife and young daughter back home by showing him call them from the ship. Then the story skips ahead to when the hijacking has actually happened. It divides its focus between the Rozen and the shipping line's Copenhagen head-office. Originally Lindholm thought of depicting everything from shipboard. But in an interview he recounts how his mother was a classic socialist and so he decided it would give him some sort of extra maverick son pleasure to look at things also particularly from the capitalists' point of view. We get plent of long looks at the raw, ragged, scary events on board as well. The result is a peculiar kind of procedural that balances the naturalistic with the traditionally suspenseful, bosses with grunts. Lindholm and his fine cast have produced a very authentic-feeling story and a fine feature, his second, his first working solo (his debut was the 2010 prison drama R, co-directed and co-written with Michael Noer).

Ignoring the advice of hired hijacking expert Connor Julian (played by actual corporate security officer Gary Skjoldmose Porter), the company's CEO, Peter C. Ludvigsen (Søren Malling), makes the decision not to use a professional negotiator but do his own dealing by phone -- and occasionally by FAX -- with the hostage-takers, represented by Omar (Abdihakin Asgar), a multilingual translator/middleman hired by the pirates, who seems to speak no English, certainly no Danish. It is the cool but arrogant Omar with whom Peter, in consultation with Connor Julian, must constantly deal, carrying out a traditional bargaining process that starts at $21 million requested by the hijackers and $210,000 offered by the company. As the Somalis slowly go down and the CEO slowly goes up, the days turn into weeks and then months, Mikkel and his shipmates aboard the Rozen must endure rapidly deteriorating conditions and increasingly harrowing psychological pressures. The film provides a growing sense of the dangerous responsibility Peter has taken on himself (there are other partners who pressure him) as well as the suffering of the family members at home.

Hollywood Reporter's Neil Young called A Hijacking "One of the more unheralded standouts at this year's Venice," and it has qualities of mainstream appeal, even if its being Danish and conveying most of its excitement through talk (negotiation) rather than action (armed encounter) make it partly a tough sell internationally. There are some choices that are limitations. The film provides good authentic feel in the shipboard and boardroom scenes, but does not expand secondary characters in depth, showing the ordeal primarily through Peter and Mikkel.

A Hijacking/Kapringen debuted in Venice's "Orizzonti" sidebar and continued at Toronto and other international festivals, opening in Denmark Sept. 20, 2012. It has UK, France, and several other country openings in summer 2013. It was screened for this review at the FSLC/MoMA March 2013 series New Directors/New Films in New York. A Magnolia Films release in the US.

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