MOVIE REVIEW | Serena Donadoni

When the big city law enforcement officer strides into a remote small town in a movie like The Wicker Man (1973) or the television series Twin Peaks (1990-91), he brings the weight of moral authority to every action he takes. This results in a certain naïveté when dealing with the locals, and consequences range from the demoralizing to the tragic. Danish filmmaker Henrik Ruben Genz plays with those genre conventions in Terribly Happy, when former Copenhagen police officer Robert Hansen (Jakob Cedergren) is transferred to an isolated village in South Jutland, where he will serve as their new marshal.

This is one of the first things Robert notices in this close-knit community: how the too friendly residents like Ingelise Buhl (Lene Maria Christensen) refer to their neighbors as the "new" this or "old" that. Like the new bicycle shop owner, who recently disappeared from Skarrild, as people are wont to do. It's a local custom, like having the marshal slap around a young shoplifter instead of arresting him, or hanging wet laundry in a precise order on the clothesline. Robert feels out of his element in such an entrenched community, and might better understand the deeper undercurrents at work if he weren't already treading water.

Hansen has a difficult time maintaining order because it's already broken down in his own life, and he doesn't realize how many of the tightly lipped folks in Skarrild sense his lack of control. Adapting Erling Jepsen's novel Frygtelig Lykkelig with fellow screenwriter Gry Dunja Jensen, director Genz builds a psychological thriller that's as sparse as it is potent. Terribly Happy employs a very specific tone; fatalism with a dollop of mordant humor, suspense with a light touch. This isn't a town where conflict derives from societal repression or guarded secrets, but a shared sense of what works best for them, outsiders be damned.

As the sole representative of governmental justice (a concept the residents regard with either benign indifference or view as secondary to their tribal-based forms of securing peace and prosperity), Robert is soon embroiled in the sleepy hamlet's long-standing dispute, between the alluring Ingelise and her brutish husband Jørgen Buhl (Kim Bodnia). It's common knowledge throughout Skarrild that when the Buhls' solemn daughter Dorthe (Mathilde Maack) wheels her squeaky baby carriage full of stuffed animals around town at night that the drunk and raging Jørgen is at home beating Ingelise to a bloody pulp.

Robert's attempts to help Ingelise prove impossibly difficult: she requires nothing less than a savior and can't recognize how damaged he really is, while her demanding presence makes him realize what he's willing to do to protect what little he has left. The more Robert loses his footing in the always soggy ground around Skarrild, the more assured Genz's direction becomes, and the marshal finds himself at one point having to protect each member of the Buhl family while simultaneously dealing with the consequences of his own crimes. He may still have his moral compass, but Robert no longer knows which way is north.

Henrik Ruben Genz, who grew up with novelist Erling Jepsen in the rural marshlands of South Jutland, finds both beauty and menace there for Terribly Happy, which received seven Robert Awards (the Danish Academy Awards) including Best Picture and Director. He captures the specificity of the misty flatlands and looming bog in crisp widescreen images and uses the landscape as an integral part of the storytelling like a classic western. But nothing is ever too solemn in Genz's take: Jørgen's fringed cowboys shirts, silver-tipped bolo ties, and incongruously white hat play with that obvious motif.

Genz uses some of the same techniques employed by the cinematic minimalists who specialize in black comedy, like Finland's Aki Kaurismäki, but Terribly Happy has a certain seriousness — even at its most surreal — that keeps it from ever becoming farcical. (Compared to the Coen canon, it's somewhere between Blood Simple and Fargo.) There's a beautiful precision to every detail, particularly the eerily effective mix of twang and suspense from composer Kaare Bjerkø, and the way cinematographer Jørgen Johansson allows the colors of the landscape to bleed indoors so that everything becomes tinged with greens and browns.

Jepsen based this novel on a real instance of domestic abuse in his family, and set it in a village similar to his hometown of Gram, Denmark. But it's the fictional character of Robert Hansen that's pivotal for his friend Genz, who sees no easy heroics for such a troubled man, or a community that knew everything and did nothing. Abrupt power shifts and bursts of intimate violence restore some semblance of order in Genz's Skarrild, where belonging is everything. For the troubled outsider of Terribly Happy, discovering where he really needs to be is the most difficult lesson of his extended, enlightening exile.

© 2010, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.

Director: Henrik Ruben Genz | Writers: Gry Dunja Jensen and Henrik Ruben Genz | Adapted from the novel Frygtelig Lykkelig by Erling Jepsen | Cinematography: Jørgen Johansson | Music: Kaare Bjerkø | Sound: Roar Skau Olsen | Production Design: Niels Sejer | Costume Design: Sussie Bjørnvad | Editing: Kasper Leick | Producers: Thomas Gammeltoft and Tina Dalhoff | Released by Oscilloscope Laboratories | Running time: 100 minutes | In Danish with English subtitles.

Cast: Jakob Cedergren (Robert Hansen), Lene Maria Christensen (Ingelise Buhl), Kim Bodnia (Jørgen Buhl), Mathilde Maack (Dorthe Buhl), Lars Brygmann (Doctor Zerlang), Anders Hove (Købmand Moos), Jens Jørn Spottag (Politimester), Henrick Lykkegaard (Præst), Peter Hesse Overgaard (Helmuth), Neils Skousen (Hansi), Sune Geertsen (Øko-Tage), Bodil Jørgensen (Bartender) and Taina Anneli Berg (Lone).