Denmark
4*
Director:
Per Fly
Screenwriters:
Per Fly
Kim Leona
Mogens Rukov
Dorte Warnøe Høgh
Director of Photography:
Harald Gunnar Paalgard
Running time: 110 minutes
Original title: Arven
It is regrettable that I have come to associate Danish cinema too readily with the work of Lars von Trier and his Dogme brothers-in-arms. There are many other films from this small country that are (at least) equally capable of tugging at our heartstrings, and Per Fly’s The Inheritance is one of them. Along similar lines, one may look to Susanne Bier’s After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet), released in 2006, a film whose images, like those of The Inheritance, were exquisitely lit and filmed with handheld cameras.
The Inheritance is set up as a tragedy from the start, and the film’s bookended structure is perhaps the only element that is worthy of harsh criticism. Director Per Fly makes it very clear from the start that Christoffer and Maria are no longer together, but as a result, he eliminates the tension that might have resulted from a linear telling of the story. After the opening scene, the film cuts to three years earlier (although, over the course of the film, the math doesn’t work out: It is in fact longer than three years), and we see the couple happy together in Stockholm.
The rest of the film would show us the deterioration of their relationship and, since we know how it will end, the film removes any hope of a successful resolution to the drama. This indication of a tragic outcome is mirrored in the plays performed by Maria, who is a theatre actress at the Royal Dramatic Theatre: At first, she stars in comedies, As You Like It and The Twelfth Night, and as the story develops, she becomes involved in a production of Shakespeare’s tragic Romeo & Juliet.
Ulrich Thomsen, who is cast as Christoffer, is an actor I’ve seen twice before, as the ice-cold white-collar terrorist in Tom Tykwer’s The International, and a decade earlier as the emotionally damaged central character of the first Dogme film, The Celebration (Festen). The Inheritance provides him with a golden opportunity to show his range, for his is not a simple character: As the only son of the family patriarch and big businessman, his mother sees him as the natural successor to his father’s steel company, even though he had distanced himself from the operation years earlier because of the pressure.
When his father commits suicide at the beginning of the film – a bad omen for anybody who contemplates the idea of taking over his job – he is shoved into the limelight by his mother and Nils, the chief financial officer, even though his brother-in-law Ulrik had, for all intents and purposes, been the second-in-command. But when Nils tells Christoffer that Ulrik has been spreading rumours about him and his mother tells him that Ulrik doesn’t have the talent to take over from her late husband, Christoffer feels it is his duty to captain the ship. In the process, his marriage gets torn apart.
The film’s depiction of the business world is relentlessly bleak, and while this world does have its benefits, even the most faithful employees sometimes need to be sidelined. Christoffer’s first act as managing director of the steel company is effectively a betrayal of his own wife: He goes against the decision he took with her moments earlier. And these betrayals, justifiable as they might be in the business context, have terrible consequences for human relations. Slowly but surely Christoffer is pulled into the world that he had sworn he would never (and later, only temporarily) be a part of.
The film does jump around from one point on the timeline to another, but in general, the flow is consistent enough for the story to feel like it is developing at the appropriate pace. Per Fly handles his actors with great insight and manages to convey the correct image of the most important figures without resorting to clichés.