Pelle the Conqueror (1987)

Director: Bille August
Writers: Martin Andersen Nexø, Bille August
Stars: Pelle Hvenegaard, Max von Sydow, Erik Paaske
Runtime: 157 minutes

Plot: A Swedish peasant and his young son immigrate from to Norway and find themselves toiling cheerlessly on a remote and desolate farm owned by a lecher, run by a sadist and staffed by misfits.

Review: The Danish film, which won the Golden Palm, at the 1988 Cannes Festival, is a vividly re-created, minutely detailed panorama of a particular time (the turn of the century), place (rural Denmark) and circumstance (life on a great farm) in the course of the four seasons. The observer is Pelle (Pelle Hvenegaard), a staunch, wide-eyed Swedish boy who has come to Denmark with his aging, destitute and widowed father, Lasse (Max von Sydow).

Lasse has promised his son that Denmark will be a land of opportunity, a place of plentiful jobs, where pork is served on Sundays and butter is spread on bread. Instead Lasse and Pelle are lucky to be hired as little better than indentured servants, underpaid, underfed and overworked.

Mr. August never indulges the pathos that is built into the story, which is to his credit as a disciplined film maker, though it also keeps the film at a slight remove from the audience. One is never unaware that this is a very long movie. Mr. August brings a cool 20th-century sensibility to what is, at heart, a piece of passionate 19th-century fiction.

This is a movie that doesn't rush the audience to its plot. Rather it keeps the audience hooked to the unfolding as elegantly as possible. Because of this approach, it's easy to catch by almost any kind of audience.

Reviewed by Intisab Shahriyar