Film review: Top-notch war movie with a powerful message

A scene from The Bombardment. Photo / Supplied

The Bombardment (137 mins) Now streaming on Netflix. In Danish with subtitles.
Written and directed by Ole Bornedal
Reviewed by Jen Shieff

The opening sequence is a little gem of a short version of the main story.

It's 1945. In rural Denmark, young Henry (Bertram Bisgaard Enevoldsen) rides along on his bike whistling, delivering eggs. He witnesses three excited girls in their early 20s setting off to a wedding, bouncing along a rough road in a car.

Suddenly there's a burst of machine gun fire from a low flying Mosquito bomber. The car blows up. Turns out the pilots have hit the wrong target. The trauma renders Henry mute.

When Henry's aunt in Copenhagen takes him in, to help him recover his speech by letting him live in an urban environment away from the sky that exposed him to such shocking danger, he goes to school with his cousin Rigmor (Ester Birch) and her friend Eva (Ella Josephine Lund Nilsson).

They are taught by nuns and, largely thanks to the youngest nun Teresa (Fanny Bornedal), they develop vivid imaginations, fired by Danish fairy tales and biblical miracles. They're a very cute trio, the girls using wonderfully inventive ways of communicating with Henry.

Denmark has its Gestapo collaborators, like Frederick (Alex Høgh Andersen). He's first seen at home in Copenhagen, being yelled at by his father who despises him for having joined the wrong side. Frederick becomes the link between the two main strands of the story, one domestic, one large scale.

The factual basis of The Bombardment, the bombing in error of the Jeanne d'Arc School when 86 schoolchildren and 18 civilian adults, many of them nuns, were killed, gave writer-director Ole Bornedal an excellent starting point for his gripping, heart-wrenching dramatisation. The target had been the Gestapo headquarters, the Shellhus in the centre of Copenhagen.

Characters are well developed. They are humans, caught up in a ghastly situation, their personal conflicts believable, their guilt understandable.

Teresa is terrified of behaving in a way she believes God won't like. Frederick, realising he's been on the side of evil, and having been taught to pray by Teresa, desperately tries to redeem himself by saving Teresa when the school is bombed and she becomes trapped under a pile of rubble in the basement. Water is rising, the rubble seems impenetrable, Frederick's heroism comes to the fore.

Also trapped are a group of prisoner-of-war Danes locked in the rafters of the Shellhus, as a human shield against the imminent raid. Their plight is seen in parallel to that of the endangered children, but it's the children who grab our hearts.

The particularly clever thing Ole Bornedal has done is to weave everyday family activities into the big picture of the war. Are children in Kiev being told right now to eat their porridge before they go to school, otherwise they'll starve to death? Would words like that be the last a parent might say to their child, whose school is blown up later in the day?

There's pathos, passion and despair in The Bombardment, a top-notch war movie with a powerful message about what happens when humanity goes astray.

Highly recommended.

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