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Terribly Happy
Apparently, the Coen brothers have a long-lost Danish cousin named Genz. How else to explain the clever tracking shots, the arch use of extreme low-angle shots, the carefully composed shots of vast horizontal vistas, and the fascination with characters who teeter between endearingly quirky and strangely menacing? The flat, deadly landscape in this case isn’t Minnesota; it’s South Jutland, the hinterlands of Denmark to which cop Robert (Cedergren) has been banished to work as a marshal after unspecified trouble in Copenhagen.
Practically the first person he meets is Ingerlise (Christensen), who sidles into the marshal’s office and announces that her husband, Jørgen, (Bodnia) has been smacking her around. The townspeople are used to settling their own problems, so they’re not happy when Robert starts acting like, you know, a policeman.
Well, a not-very-good policeman; he’s clearly attracted to Ingerlise, and he stumbles headlong into a complete mess in the proud tradition of film noir heroes played for saps by femmes fatale. As things get darker and weirder, Genz displays a tight control of mood, until we get that wonderful noirish feeling that the ending is both surprising and inevitable.
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