This smallish Danish film caught my eye a year or so ago in the course of reading someone else's praise of recent Scandinavian productions. I wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment that something's going very right up there, particularly with the Danish stuff and A Hijacking is a great example of whatever concerted and judicious process is taking place.
It opens without preamble into the banalities of life on board a commercial freight ship in the midst of the Indian Ocean, observations centring on Mikkel (Johan Philip Asbæk) the cook, and his long-anticipated reunion with his distant wife and child. From there we are removed to the shipping co's Danish HQ, where flinty CEO Peter Ludvigsen (Søren Malling) has both beady eyes set squarely on his operation's bottom line. When Somali pirates board the ship, the crew become the subject of gruelling negotiations between the mercurial Omar, the pirates' broker, and Ludvigsen, who must weigh the advice he receives from his consultant against everything he knows and feels.
It opens without preamble into the banalities of life on board a commercial freight ship in the midst of the Indian Ocean, observations centring on Mikkel (Johan Philip Asbæk) the cook, and his long-anticipated reunion with his distant wife and child. From there we are removed to the shipping co's Danish HQ, where flinty CEO Peter Ludvigsen (Søren Malling) has both beady eyes set squarely on his operation's bottom line. When Somali pirates board the ship, the crew become the subject of gruelling negotiations between the mercurial Omar, the pirates' broker, and Ludvigsen, who must weigh the advice he receives from his consultant against everything he knows and feels.
Lindholm recognises and respects the bounds of this scenario. He eschews the florid dramatics that would doubtlessly pad the greasy bulk of an American studio production of this nature, laying down verité in midst of the opening titles and embellishing that homely substance with more of the same. Three metres back from the screen I could smell the holed-up crew and their slop buckets and feel the tasteful laminate bruising Ludvigsen's Copenhangen elbows. He thoroughly exploits the yawning blank drawn by a western audience pondering a Somali pirate's bottom line and uses the same viewer's suspicion of corporate intent to screw that lid on even tighter. Sidelining the captain and thereby removing all chance of deferral to authority forces the players to deal with themselves and their captors; the latter's twitchy opacity is well-delineated, underscored by the lack of subtitles. The sheer drudgery of long-distance negotiation becomes almost insupportable. I got up and walked around a room a couple of times in the course of the film as physical removal began to feel necessary. That hasn't happened for a while. I was also deeply appreciative of the attention paid to the real, personalised price of violence and trauma, a rare concession in a piece so dependent on masculine imperative.
By militating against common expectation, Lindholm is inviting the kind of critique that more conventional practitioners avoid and under this scrutiny, against a figurative ocean of possibilities, some aspects of A Hijacking felt narrow and parsimonious. Life onboard is sketched out via doco-type capture at the expense of virtually any visual flourishes, and to me this feels like a lack of vision, a wasted opportunity to co-opt the geographic immensity that would surely have seemed like a dreadful co-conspirator. When it finally unfolds, the violent incident we were bound for seems a little... superfluous, mistimed, even gratuitous, more like a lapse than anything else. The refusal to present the plodding machina of the pirates' advent certainly deserves applause, but what might have looked like discipline under other circumstances conspired with the no-frills production values to get me wondering if they just didn't have the budget for it. Ditto for Lindholm's script- it's tight, and perhaps too threadbare when considered retrospectively. I would have liked a little more from this fecund scenario.
That said, A Hijacking is an uncut, unexpected gem, taut and gruelling, a thing well told and simply-executed. I thoroughly recommend it. Available on iTunes.
That said, A Hijacking is an uncut, unexpected gem, taut and gruelling, a thing well told and simply-executed. I thoroughly recommend it. Available on iTunes.
RSS Feed
