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Film Description
Danish drama set in Copenhagen during World War 2, based on real events and eyewitness acounts. Flame and Citron are the code names for two undercover resistance fighters working for the Holger Danske group, which works to undermine the Nazi occupation. The younger and more idealistic Flame fantasises about launching an open attack on the Nazis, while sensitive family man Citron is more concerned with the politics of resistance. But when their boss Aksel Winther orders Flame to execute his girlfriend, beautiful and enigmatic courier Ketty, he finds himself questioning the morality of the order. Finding themselves in an increasingly claustrophobic situation, the two men realise they have only each other to rely on, and work together to track down Gestapo chief Hoffmann.
Just as each nation has its bright-burning legends, so too they accrue
darker shadows and secrets, a process only accelerated during wartime:
that’s the crux o... more >
Just as each nation has its bright-burning legends, so too they accrue
darker shadows and secrets, a process only accelerated during wartime:
that’s the crux of Ole Christian Madsen’s thoughtful and handsomely
mounted account of the two most celebrated Danish fighters in the Second
World War’s Holger Danske resistance movement. Thure Lindhardt’s Flame
is a boyish, melancholic blank with a shock of red hair that leaves him
a marked man; Mads Mikkelsen the sweaty, bespectacled and perpetually
sour-faced Citron.
These two agents are dispatched by their seniors on a daily basis with
file cards on which are inscribed the names and addresses of their next
targets, either informants or supporters of the Nazi occupation: simple
gun-for-hire work, unquestioningly accepted. Yet as the War goes on,
doubts set in. Flame is sent to kill an eloquent German doctor who
diagnoses him as a misguided neurotic; shaken, and unable to pull the
trigger, he seeks refuge in a relationship with an older woman, a blonde
who’s also a brunette, and seems to know far too much.
Citron, meanwhile, torn between commitment to the cause and pre-existing
family ties, crosses a line when he robs and beats a grocer suspected of
collaboration to provide for a woman who’s no longer faithful to him.
The theme of duality - how conflict forces individuals to live two lives
simultaneously - is perfectly illustrated through Madsen’s deeply
Scandinavian sense of design: while early assassination set-pieces take
place in the bright light of day, the film’s interiors are murky and
subterranean, all the better to mirror the heroes’ increasingly troubled
states of mind.
A brooding seriousness of its own - not to mention a surprisingly
sustained and successful re-reading of WWII as the ultimate in Freudian
upheavals - makes Flame & Citron a very different proposition to Paul
Verhoeven’s Dutch romp Black Book, or even Ang Lee’s elegantly
withholding spy game Lust, Caution: while his entry in this newly
popular genre more than amply commemorates the agents’ heroism and
derring-do, Madsen has no illusions as to the brutal, unpaid and
psychically damaging work resistance entails. < less
