In Demark it was released as Bastarden, or The Bastard.
In the rest of the world, The Promised Land. That's a
bit of a conceptual difference, yeah?
(Bastarden)
dir: Nikolaj Arcerl
2023
After spending time in the Land of Saints and Sinners, via a detour through the Land of Bad, we’ve ended up in The Promised Land, which seems like a nice place to visit, but I’m not sure I would want to live there.
A title like that promises something Biblical, and what this film delivers is a curious and phenomenal looking film about a guy who wants to claim a bit of land and make a go of it no matter the cost to himself and the people around him. But of course there is some rich fuck nearby who doesn’t want him to succeed and does all sorts of awful things to Our Hero and the people around him in order to get his way.
Nothing deters our hero. Played by Danish superstar Mads Mikkelsen, you can pretty much expect just how emotionless and stoic he’s going to be for 90 per cent of the flick while dealing with superstitious serfs or sadistic aristocrats.
If you know, you know. That face of his… So handsome, so cruel. But he is not the cruel one in this flick, though he has his moments.
This flick is set around 1750 in Denmark, at a time when feudal lords own the serfs on their lands, slavery is considered wonderful, and these awful aristocrats rape and murder whoever they feel like with impunity. There is a region called Jutland, which is all moors and heather. The blasted heath. A place where no-one does agriculture. But Ludvig Kahlen is going to do agriculture. BECAUSE HE SAID HE WOULD! And everyone saying “Nu uh” makes him say “uh hu” even more.
He gets some undertaking from some corrupt courtiers that if he makes a go of it and gets a yield, he’ll be made a noble and get a mansion and all sorts of complimentary merch, probably.
And so he starts his journey, with a horse and one tool, and somehow thinks it will all work out.
It seems like lunacy, but the man has been planning this for a while. After a 25 year stint in the German army, earning the rank of Captain, all Kahlen wants is to farm, earn a further title, and then every hardship and slight he’s endured will be worth it. No course runs so smoothly as that.
The local (young, hot) priest (Gustav Lind) takes an interest, and starts helping him out after introducing a young couple he has been hiding from the local lord’s men. Ana Barbara and Johannes bear scars both psychological and mental from their time at Schinkel’s estate, but they are still indentured to him, and legally he still owns them. So they have to work for no pay and hide while on Kahlen’s property.
Nearby, there’s also a group of Romani outlaws, who send a girl even they despise to steal from Kahlen, and at one stage, to trick him into the woods so they can rob or kill him. This is not easy to articulate, but everyone in this flick is deeply racist towards the little girl, because she has darker skin than the rest of these Northern albinos. Everyone says the most appalling shit to her. I know it’s supposed to be the 1750s, and that people then weren’t as transcendent and enlightened as we are today (since no racism exists anymore in this year of our Lord 2024, praise be to the Flying Spaghetti Monster), but it’s still hard to hear people being so fucking awful to a child. The Tartar Romani are despised even more, even by serfs, who are little more than slaves themselves. Everyone’s got to have someone to look down on, I guess.
That little girl, though, Anmai Mus (Melina Hagberg), is an absolute firecracker, as adept at stealing a chicken as she is at flinging a particularly pungent set of curse words. Seeing how despised she is even by her own people is even sadder.
For once it’s people like the young priest, and Kahlen himself, men of God and the broader World, respectively, who call out the locals’ superstitious nonsense for the ignorance that it is. And yet, in the film’s most heartbreaking scene, when throwing her under the bus will get him what he wants, he does so, giving in to local prejudice, albeit reluctantly.
After so many struggles, after such hardship, and after a steady and continuous set of obstacles, roadblocks and outright murder on the part of the awful landholder who wants to claim the heath as his, Kahlen has sacrificed too much and too many people to back down from his dreams.
And when you find out what it is he wants to grow, well, it all seems a bit silly.
I mean, potatoes? Potatoes! Actually, that’s not a bad idea. Maybe they are the thing that will transform that realm, and make his dreams a reality.
This flick, though it’s based on a true story, nonetheless is a harsh, yet somehow lush and romantic treatment on what happened. It’s pretty easy to differentiate between stuff that likely happened and other stuff that likely did not happen, such as the resolution at the end (which is nonetheless a satisfying way to deliver comeuppance to the thoroughly vile Schinkel, who fictionally deserves everything that he fictionally got).
It’s about how it feels, though. Good doesn’t triumph just because it’s ‘good’. Kahlen may be rigid and inflexible, and too set on his goals to the detriment of other people, but he at least allows for siding with the found family he’s put together over his dreams of joining the nobility.
It’s a long slog for him, and it is perhaps a long slog for us, with months and months and years of struggle, and unchecked brutality on the part of his enemies, before he gets anywhere, so if you’re familiar with these kinds of films, you either have the stomach for it or not.
For me the granddaddy of them all, in terms of these kinds of “to farm is noble, but to die destitute is divine” is of course the great Jean de Florette / Manon de Sources one two punch of Provencal peasant pictures, but this is a much harsher treatment. The Jutland moors, like most moors, whether in Jutland or Yorkshire, look like a place humans shouldn’t really be trying to grow stuff, or make a living, or even walk around on too long without a really good coat and scarf. I mean, I love the aesthetics of these places, but I wouldn’t want to have to make a living there.
Of course this being a visual and emotional medium even the harshness of the place is rendered vibrant and beautiful by the cinematography, which has the lushness of oil paintings of the era, especially the night scenes lit by candlelight. There’s also a scene where, having engaged the band of Tartar Romani to work on his property, even though it’s against the law, they’re burning the heather in order to prepare the soil for planting. Lit by such golds and reds, it’s hard not to think of Days of Heaven Terrence Malick’s masterpiece, and even similar scenes in Scorsese’s recent Killers of the Flower Moon, which would have been filmed contemporarily.
It’s funny that such a similar looking scene in one flick portends the flames of Hell itself versus being a hopeful and uplifting scene in the more recent flick. I guess it comes down to intentions, good or otherwise.
So it looks great, it has a great score, with a plucked cello string again doing a lot of heavy lifting in order to give the flick a nervous, propulsive energy despite the slow slog that is the plot churning along, and the performances, except for the landed gentry villain, are all fine, and occasionally great. Mads Mikkelsen can practically do no wrong in my eyes, and he is effective and incredibly strong here. But he is more than matched by Amanda Collin, who is formidable and phenomenal as Ana Barbara, who is not only his equal in strength but exceeds him in conscience and humanity. She is the conscience he doesn’t always allow himself to listen to, despite knowing she’s right.
She also has the most to lose of anyone if this doesn’t work out, so her fierce dedication (not to get back into the odious clutches of Schinkel) is a strong and believable one.
Alas, even in success there is defeat, even in victory, loss, and even when we get our heart’s desire, if we lose the people we love, does that victory mean anything anymore? This is not a straightforward flick about someone working hard and everything working out. After all, life is chaos, as a certain piece of shit keeps pointing out, mostly because he keeps causing more chaos for the people he seeks to control.
But since it’s chaos, in the wise words of comedian Patton Oswalt, in the face of it, we can be kind. It’s a lesson Ludvig Kahlen learns after all his struggles, and it’s a lesson reinforced for the rest of us, who of course knew it all along.
9 ways in which no-one really ever gets to the The Promised Land, because God always promises it to different sets of people just to fuck with everybody, out of 10
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“It’s the King’s land. I work for the King” – just keep repeating it, eventually someone will believe you - The Promised Land
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