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Extra ticket for film festival tonight

Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2009 7:13 pm
by Lister Farrar
My wife's sick. Call me if you want to go. 9:00

Flame & Citron
World Perspective
(Denmark, 2008, 130 mins)
35mm
Directed By: Ole Christian Madsen
Producers: Lars Bredo Rahbek
Screenwriter: Lars K. Andersen, Ole Christian
Cast: Thure Lindhart, Mads Mikkelsen

Madsen began his career working in the Dogme style but the remarkable, ultra-stylized Flame & Citron is as far from that aesthetic as you can get, yet in terms of sensibility it is very much in harmony with his earlier works driven by his fine-tuned awareness of uncomfortable truths, deceit and betrayal. Flame & Citron tells the story of two Danish resistence heroes, Bent (Thure Lindhart) and Jørgen (Mads Mikkelsen), better known by their code names Flame and Citron, but it is far from your typical World War II period piece. Instead, it plays like some unholy, brilliant marriage between spy noir and comic book movie. Filled to the brim with assassination plots, double-crosses, larger-than-life villains, and big, dramatic gestures. And under that grand façade, the film grapples with tough moral questions regarding war, occupation, survival, and ideology. Flame & Citron is permeated by a sense of menace and unease that is palpable but difficult to explain or describe. The film is quiet - Flame's noir-ish voiceover narration is basically whispered - but the intensity still builds to a fever pitch that rarely lets up. It's scary, genre-bending stuff, daring and genuinely interesting.