By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 1/7/24 – Last night at the Landmark Sunset Theatres in West Hollywood was a special screening of the new Danish film The Promised Land (2023), directed by Nikolaj Arcel and starring Mads Mikkelsen. Both were present after the screening for an insightful and entertaining Q&A. The Promised Land is an epic period film about how the worst impediments to progress come not from nature, but actually from man. Based on the 2020 Danish bestselling Ida Jessen novel The Captain and Ann Barbara, the story takes place in 1755 and follows the battle for the Jutland heath in Denmark at that time. Featuring an incredible performance by Mads Mikkelsen, this is a film worth seeing and will be in selected theatres in February 2024. As we learned at the Q&A, the film’s original title Bastarden was changed for international distribution, although it seems to me that the Danish title remains the much more provocative and thematically fitting choice. The film is Denmark’s submission for consideration for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Oscars.
Mikkelsen plays Ludvig Kahlen, a stoic man who defied his origin as the son of a maid raped by a nobleman to become a military leader in 18th-century Denmark. When his time in the service is over, he insists that he be granted a chance to settle a portion of the country in northwest Denmark known as the heath of Jutland – brutal, barren land on which no one has been able to grow anything. While King Frederik V doesn’t want a parcel of his kingdom to go to waste, no one thinks the heath can sustain life. Kahlen will prove them wrong, but he has to get around the vicious Frederik de Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), who owns the land near the heath and wants to maintain his grip on the area.
The Promised Land takes its cues from Ida Jessen’s novel with a romanticizing of history that bends it a bit out of shape in the screenplay by Nikolaj Arcel and Anders Thomas Jensen. Captain Ludvig Kahlen (Mikkelsen) applied to King Frederick V to cultivate the heath, which the King’s administrators (including Soren Malling) initially deny, considering generations of men, many far nobler than Kahlen, have tried to tame it. Kahlen has a secret, having imported potatoes from Germany. He also offers to use his own meager pension to pay for the endeavor, and he’s permitted to do so, considering it’s a low-grade item on the King’s agenda. However, the unabashedly cruel and hotheaded landowner Frederick De Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg) believes he has dibs over the heaths and stymies every possible attempt to ruin Kahlen. It doesn’t help when the local priest (Gustav Lindh presents two escaped tenement farmers, Johannes (Morten Hee Andersen) and his wife Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin), who are basically runaway slaves owned by De Schinkel, as wards to for his cause.
Tensions escalate, leading to extreme violence, while Edel Helene (Kristine Kujath Thorp), an aristocrat who’s expected to wed De Schinkel, offers herself to Kahlen should he succeed in his endeavor. Illegally employing a band of outlaws who reside in the wilderness, Kahlen finds himself drawn to a spunky young Tatar girl, Anmai Mus (Melina Hagberg), whom he allows to live in his home, tended to by Ann Barbara. Their promise of happiness, however, is not destined to last.
The Promised Land would make a fantastic double feature with the Arnaud des Pallieres 2013 take on Heinrich von Kleist’s classic Michael Kohlhaas (also starring Mads Mikkelson), where the actor plays the maligned horse dealer who sets his country ablaze, set two centuries prior. Such is not the destined glory for Kahlen, who just wants to grow some potatoes and earn the title of Baron for his troubles.
The film is impressive, verging on epic, but rather stolid in its conclusions which seems contrived. The Promised Land is a film for people who miss John Ford or liked Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, a drama of human resistance against an unforgiving landscape. It would seem director Arcel was returning to the period formula which worked so well in his earlier 2012 breakthrough A Royal Affair.