Mediocre Movie Club Movie Reviews

Flame and Citron

6/6/2016

A-
3.58

A dark retelling of WWII resistance fighters and Danish heroes, codenamed Flammen and Citronen.

Directed by Ove Christian Madsen
Starring Mads Mikkelson and Thure Lindhardt
Initial Review by Sean Riley

Flame and Citron is a story about a pair of members of the Danish resistance group Holger Danske during World War II. Flame and Citron are assassins who calmly carry out their missions with little information in regards to their targets only knowing they are Danish informers or collaborators with the Nazi occupation of Denmark. They purposely do not target German officials despite their desire to do so for fear it will increase the chances of retaliation. The build up here is a little slow but the noir-ish style of the film directed by Ole Christian Madsen, and the performances of Thure Lindhardt and Mads Mikkelsen as Flame and Citron respectively engage you through the slower setup and lead into scene after scene of excellence as events begin to unfold.

When Flame and Citron are given an assignment to kill 3 Germans, they begin to question their handler Aksel Winther. Among the 3 targets is German intelligence officer Gilbert. The Flame and Gilbert scene is when the movie really begins to take hold and is the first excellent scene with Gilbert explaining the 3 reasons people fight in wars and what makes a good soldier. Until this point everything has been black and white and gray is now introduced.

When Winther then orders them to kill a new informant Ketty Sellmer who happens to be Flame’s kinda new girlfriend the confusion really sets in for him. She claims innocence and produces evidence that Winther is just tying up loose ends that will make him look bad after the war. Who is telling the truth? Who is lying? Personally I think they both are telling the truth and they’re both lying. That is one of the strong threads in the film that it’s not 100% clear who is providing information and why and it’s up to the viewer to choose who to believe in the moment as it is with Flame and Citron. Flame’s love for Ketty has him believe her until he gets more information and then as he sees her again. Each meeting Ketty provides just enough information to avoid him killing her. Sidebar on Ketty- if I’m a wanted man with a large bounty on my head I try to avoid meeting new people.

Eventually Flame and Citron attempt to go rogue and kill the head of the Gestapo. The Mexican standoff in the hallway between Flame and Hoffman is my 2nd favorite scene to mention- Hoffman is eventually able to get Flame to realize the options are both live to fight another day, both die now, or wait for the police/German military to show up and only Flame and all his friends die. Great tension shown here. We also get to meet Hoffman who seems much like Gilbert earlier to not be 100% evil as he had been made out to be. The end of the movie when he yells at his men for taking pictures with Flame and Citron’s bodies support his less than pure evil depiction in this scene.

Almost immediately after we get another almost great scene in Stockholm with Winther and the other decision makers trying to convince Flame and Citron to abandon the assassinations and take commissions in the military. The tension is turned to 11 here but the scene felt like it was cut short and could’ve been more. Very good but not quite great.

Eventually, Citron goes down in a very Butch and Sundance style fight while Flame bites his cyanide pill. That we see Ketty getting paid the reward doesn’t convince me she’s the bad guy. I very much think she did what she felt she had to for her survival, but the information about Winther was also true of what he was doing for his own survival.

Great performances, direction set the tone well and some great scenes make for a great movie. Citron’s family stuff is a bit on the negative side as they didn’t add anything for me. Interesting to note, there was some controversy in Denmark that Flame and Citron were not portrayed more heroically. This is a positive for me. The thing about heroes is they’re always just people who through their actions become heroic. I’m going A. It’d be A+ if not for the slowish beginning and Citron’s boring family.

“Where do we go after this? When it’s all over. I don’t know. Can we ever go back? Can we ever go forward? Perhaps. Perhaps not. At this moment there is only The Flame.”

5 Comments

Admin

6/6/2016 04:22:48 pm

Space reserved for replies to the initial review.

Bryan

6/6/2016 04:27:53 pm

I was dreading another foreign pick, but this was splendid. I was convinced Flame and Citron were heroes for the first 40 minutes of the movie. The next 30 I'll steal Sean's line, "Personally I think they both are telling the truth and they’re both lying. That is one of the strong threads in the film that it’s not 100% clear who is providing information and why and it’s up to the viewer to choose who to believe in the moment as it is with Flame and Citron." The last 40 made me realize Flame is just a kid who seemingly believed whatever he was last told.

Great acting, directing, and art work - but I wish I could have seen more of it. Having to read subtitles kills me.

Any movies that send the viewer on a morality, truth telling loop-de-loop always score well in my book. While American cinema gives us the garbage heroes in Fury. I love what the Danes have made in "Flame and Citron"

I'll go A- for a bit too superhero-esque injury dodging.

Jon

6/10/2016 01:22:58 am

We've got some solid variety in our war movies here at the MMC. Beasts of No Nation captured combat through an insurgent force while Apocalypse Now brought us the perspective of an occupying force. Flame and Citron is the least war-like film of the three, mixing the epic setting with an espionage-like plot. Those two aspects clash from an American perspective. The wide-scope morality of WWII, the most strategically straightforward of any 20th century conflict, loses tactical focus on the ground, as our code-named protagonists lose themselves to vengeance against the big picture. I don't know that there's ever been anything like this in American Nazi-fighting movies. Leave it to the Europeans to add a much-appreciated nuance, as I tend to conflate complication with realism.

As a film about resistance fighters, Flame and Citron does what it has to in drawing the viewer in. I would imagine that for most Americans, if they pictured themselves under Nazi occupation, they would imagine themselves fighting back. Every good patriot would shoot down occupiers in the street, or at the very least, perform acts of sabotage and undermine the war machine, until that glorious day when they were kicked out, things returned to normal, and a parade was thrown in their honor. There's something primal and cool about a righteous assassin walking down the street in a billowing trench coat. Bent's mantra of 'we have to remember we're fighting Nazi's, not people' is straight out of Inglourious Basterds, the deeply felt rewriting of history we'd all wish were true.

Even in the early moments of Flame and Citron, Bent's line has a tinge of tragedy that Ole Christian Madsen gradually turns up into the sharpest of violin stings. The fact is, in Denmark or France or a hypothetical, subjugated US, there will always be sympathizers and collaborators, and they look the same as they do after occupation as they did before it. That's the conflict in Flame and Citron that truly resonates; how wartime destroys order and community, even far away from the front lines. It places all into an animalistic state of nature, a diamond-focused tribalism that can be utilized by those more wily participants to make a bad situation worse. Bent and Jorgen's patriotism is turned against them, making them willing dupes first, and then ineffectual martyrs. This is a black film where the most sensible parties are arguing for peace with the most vile ideology to ever walk the earth.

As low men on the totem pole, Bent and Jorgen, and their respective actors, do an excellent job grappling with how morally exposed they are. The reveal of Winther's duplicity, which I 100% believe as true, turns them into the very collaborators they're going after, and from that point, their fates are sealed. These guys are just incapable of running the resistance on their own, frozen out from Swedish and British intelligence. It seems like they continue on their assassination path, despite orders to assemble an underground army in advance of the coming British or Soviet invasion, out of penance. I don't think they think everything's going to be good again if they can kill Hoffmann the Gestapo chief; it's revenge against Winther and what they see as the necessary course, making them unsuited to warfare in the first place. Though Ketty turns them in, it's easy to sympathize with her. What a strange place Flame and Citron leaves me in, where it turns out duplicitousness with the Nazis is the best course of action instead of outright opposition. This is kind of what Inglourious Basterds does with Hans Landa, but he's given his identifying mark at the end. Madsen just lets the viewer marinate in the deaths of these Danish national heroes, only vindicating them with a text crawl that he just spent the previous two hours undermining.

6/10/2016 01:23:32 am

Flame and Citron is a huge success in making the viewer think about what they would do under occupation. In many of the other things that make up a story, it's less successful. I thought everything with Citron's family was a bust. On the one hand, there's the stock trope of a wife that wants her husband to quit X and spend more time with them, even if X is being an integral part of fighting Nazi rule. How many actresses have had to try and make this one-note character interesting? On the other, if I never see a character in the midst of leaving his family in the hands of another man tell that man never to hurt his former family, that would be fine with me. A smaller complaint on Citron's final moments, I get that the final shootout is historically accurate (the real Jorgen fought Nazi's off for hours), but it was unclear why he survived the police execution in the first place. Why would they put him in an ambulance if they were just going to kill all the officers in the first place? Doesn't his attempt to run arouse an insurmountable amount of suspicion? It felt like something was missing in what had otherwise been a tightly plotted film, and a further knock against Jorgen's character, leading to the surprising conclusion where I feel Thure Lindhardt out-acted personal favorite Mads Mikkelson.

Flame and Citron is a necessary corrective to the moral certainty of WWII. Inglourious Basterds is, and remains, one of my favorite movies, but its appeal is in the fantastic. There wasn't anything innately evil about an individual Nazi or a Nazi collaborator. They made evil choices, but they were still just people who thought of themselves as the stars of the movie of their lives, just as capable of being manipulated as the resistance fighters who are hailed as heroes. Flame and Citron captures how easy it is to lose sight of simplistic rights and wrongs when the stakes get so impossibly high. This is a hard movie to love, based on its darkness and the way it messes up Jorgen's character, but it gets the best grade I can give to something that doesn't reach the 'love' threshhold. This gets a B+.

Shane

6/15/2016 03:06:06 pm

This movie deserves a longer review than I'm about to give, but I'm le tired.

The story is intriguing, even if paced a little slow. I'm a sucker for historical based things.

Nice job of letting the viewer be as confused on the motives of the "bosses" as Flame and Citron were. I like how not everyone was wholly good or bad.

Mads and Lindhardt are great, especially Lindhart.

Again, it was a bit slow at times. Citron's family life was just meh. Kinda seemed forced and didn't really match his character.

B+

Flame and Citron

A-
3.58

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Flame and Citron

A-3.58

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A-
3.58