Flame and Citron

Unlike director Ole Christian Madsen’s intimate domestic dramas Kira’s Reason and Prague, Flame & Citron is a sprawling World War II epic about the Danish resistance against Nazi occupation. In terms of sensibility, however, the film is very much in harmony with Madsen’s earlier work, driven by his fine-tuned awareness of uncomfortable truths, deceit and betrayal. His heroes are Bent (Thure Lindhart) and Jørgen (Mads Mikkelsen), better known in Denmark by their code names Flame & Citron. As the key assassins for the Resistance, they were responsible for eliminating dozens of Danish collaborators and, eventually, Nazi officers. But as Madsen shows, Flame and Citron were not conventional heroic types, nor were their actions as clear-cut as several generations of Danes believed. Inspired in part by Jean-Pierre Melville’s legendary L’Armée des Ombres, Flame & Citron is based on the premise that those who defied the Nazis lived on the margins, the kind of people who were looked down upon before the war and had absolutely nothing to lose. Flame (a reference to his blazing red hair) is at the very least a sociopath. He enjoys – possibly relishes – killing. Citron is a wounded, morose and completely unemployable alcoholic and addict. As his wife tells him at a dismal birthday party for their young daughter, he wasn’t much of a husband before the war either. The other principals are Hoffman (Christian Berkel), a leader in the Gestapo; Aksel Winther (Peter Mygind), the Resistance leader who gives the duo their marching orders; and Ketty Selmer (Stine Stengade), with whom Flame is in love even though both he and Citron are suspicious of her. None of these relationships are exactly transparent, however, and the political situation encourages all manner of treachery and realpolitik. As we now know, many of the heroic tales about World War II were myths. Shady deals were made and rampant profiteering was common, frequently at high levels of government. Trenchant and relevant (the film evokes numerous parallels to the current situation in Iraq), Flame & Citron is courageous, complex and gripping, and has already become one of the highest-grossing pictures in Danish film history. - Steve Gravestock, Toronto International Film Festival Programme Mads Mikkelsen and Thure Lindhardt both nominated for Best Actor at the European Film Awards 2008