Flame & Citron (FILM)
Certainly one of the worst movie titles ever. Maybe it sounded better in the original Danish? Flammen & Citronen. Hmm, okay, it’s a little better. Don’t let a badly chosen title stop you though from watching this incredibly complex, but hugely entertaining film based on actual events.
In a nutshell…
Flame and Citron are the undercover names for two members of the WWII Danish resistance movement. The film follows their courageous, and eventually morally ambiguous, journey to assassinate Nazi targets.
The mood of the film…
The film opens with Flame narrating how to kill. The bottom line is to stay calm, he says. He then casually walks up to an editor ‘spewing Nazi propaganda’, calls him by his name and shoots him in the head when he turns around. He calmly walks back to the car. The narrator takes over again when Flame enters a pub shortly after the killing and asks you, the viewer, what better place to celebrate killing Nazi’s than in a pub crawling with Nazi’s?
From there the film is fast paced and slick, but soon pits the killings and isolation these agents experience against the longing for family left behind, meeting a new girlfriend or living a normal life. It shows the struggle between the cause they deeply believe in and the damage it is doing to their souls.
Best one liner…
Nothing stands out except, What better place to celebrate killing Nazi’s than in a pub crawling with Nazi’s?
Best scene…
Flame refuses to kill women. Citron has to then go into an apartment and kill for the first time. He can’t do it though and only shoots her in the shoulder. Now Flame is forced to go up and finish the job. He bursts into the apartment, walks past the woman’s speechless husband/boyfriend and breaks open the bathroom door. The woman turns around to look at him. With a fairly gentle gesture he turns her head, her staring eyes, away from him, before pulling the trigger.
.
What makes the film relevant today?
Apart from the fact that it taught me something I did not know about Danish history, it is as relevant as most war films today. It is supposed to show us the meaninglessness of war, and the blurry lines dividing enemies from friends, but we will probably not learn from it and go on killing one another.
Rotten Tomatoes score…
87%
My score…
95%