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BLOODY
ANGELS
7/10
1732
Hotten : Norway 1998 : Karin Julsrud : 100 mins
Bloody
Angels starts like a Norwegian Twin Peaks: big-city detective Nicholas
(Reidar Sorensen) encounters rural weirdness while investigating a shocking
murder. A few weeks before, the body of a young girl had been found raped
and mutilated near the remote village of Hotten. The prime suspects were
the Hartmannss, a pair of brothers from a notorious local family, and
vigilante justice had soon left one dead and the other on the run. Nicholas
arrives in Hotten to find the townsfolk at best unhelpful, at worst aggressively
hostile – even the local police openly resent his presence. The only person
who doesn’t freeze him out is his near-namesake Niklas (Gaute Skjegstad,
from Dancer In The Dark),
the Hartmanns’ younger brother, whose family connections mean he’s on
the receiving end of some merciless bullying at school…
First-time
director Julsrud struggles to find her feet in the early stages – for
one thing, there are just too many shots. The uncertain tone, meanwhile,
reminds us how deceptively easy David Lynch blends horror and humour.
But just as Bloody Angels looks like turning into yet another triumph
of style over substance, it thankfully deepens and darkens into a sub-Arctic
cross between The Wicker Man and Straw Dogs, with Nicholas
first pitted against a whole community of people who wish him ill, then
faced with an agonising moral dilemma when the missing Hartmann brother
turns to him for help.
The
sequences where the Hottenites display their contempt for the outsider
in their midst are electrifyingly uncomfortable: Nicholas’s sophisticated
notions of absolute justice are tested against older, rougher, more vengeful
forms. The city-dweller is given some harsh lessons in country grammar,
a frontier mentality that suggests the film’s original Norwegian title
1732 Hotten refers as much to a time as it does to a place.We’re
forced to examine the circumference of our own received ideas of law and
morality – as the town’s bartender remarks, “What if we’re all in
on it?”
Prefiguring
The Pledge, a shocking
murder in snowy terrain brings into focus a generational decline as perceived
by its world-weary cop protagonist. Listening to a radio quiz in his car,
Nicholas is shocked when a young caller doesn’t even know the king’s name,
and other symptoms are much more serious, not least the awful bullying
inflicted on Niklas by his callous peers. It’s impossible to say, of course,
whether the essential conservatism of such a world-view is held by the
film-makers, or just their characters – but, like The Pledge, Bloody
Angels’ serious points (and technical skill) are undermined by their
reliance on rickety plot dynamics.
Nicholas
has a peanut allergy – no less cheap a trick than in, say, Fearless
and AntiTrust, and a classic symptom of screenwriter desperation.
Just in case little Niklas’s bullying isn’t enough to arouse our sympathy,
the script makes him a talented pianist. And Nicholas just so happens
to be given a video of the young girl’s murder which handily reveals the
crucial details of who was responsible for her death - enabling the whole
thing to be wrapped up in a predictably ironic, circle-of-violence finale.
There
are lapses of judgement all along the way - a comic/sinister priest and
a nosy female journalist keep popping up, and seem to have strayed in
from other movies entirely. They torpedo any scenes in which they feature
– similarly disruptive is Julsrud’s disastrous decision to intersperse
the action with a caterwauling karaoke version of ‘When the Saints Go
Marching In.’ This is a particular shame, because the moody music (partly
by a-ha’s Magne Furuholmen) otherwise contributes much to Bloody Angels’
quirky atmosphere of woozy foreboding. And ‘When the Saints’ actually
figures in one of the inspired moments: Nicholas stumbles into a choir
performance by the local men (the dark side of Cool
& Crazy?) that features most of his tormentors. One
by one they fall silent, until only the most defiant is left to finish
his line with malevolent emphasis: “O when the moon, O when the moon drips
red with blood…”
24th
January, 2002
(seen
Jan-8-02, Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle)
by Neil
Young
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