A disquieting movie examining the malleable nature of morality during World War II opens today. No, it’s not directed by some dude named Tarantino. You’re kidding, right?
Flame & Citron spans a fateful year in the lives of two real-life members of the Danish Resistance, the fearless young Bent Faurschou-Hviid (nicknamed Flame, on account of his red hair) and his grizzled wheelman Jorgen Haagen Schmith, aka Citron. They are immortalized by their countrymen, yet director Ole Christian Madsen deliberately prints the fact rather than the legend. His approach reveals the duo to be patriots but not heroes, which is another way of saying that it’s about the end of innocence — theirs and ours.
Innocent might seem like an odd way to describe cool, calm assassins certain of the righteousness of their mission(s). Flame & Citron is about the price one pays to embrace a cause, and it’s not (just) one’s life: Citron (the stalwart Mads Mikkelsen, whom we don’t expect to see in a supporting role), noirish in his fedora, unshaven and bleary-eyed, gradually loses his family as he’s consumed by the crusade to eliminate collaborators with the occupying Nazis. Meanwhile, the ruthlessly efficient Flame (the charismatic Thure Lindhardt) develops crippling doubts as he finds himself played, used, spun and betrayed by those he admires and trusts.
We still like to think of World War II as the good war, with a clear-cut fascist enemy that had to be defeated. The further we get from that period, however, movies about the war tend to be increasingly nuanced and complex. Black-and-white turns out to have myriad shades of gray, and lesser human impulses have a corrosive, overriding effect on idealism.
This seems like a good spot to mention Inglourious Basterds, also set during the brutal heyday of the Third Reich. No one can match Tarantino when it comes to creating charming lowlifes, and he’s such a terrific writer of dialogue that he distracts us (at least until the jokey final sequence) from noticing that Basterds is just another of his exercises in nihilistic playacting. It has nothing to say about war, any war, or the men and women caught up in it.