Two striking films in this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race probe the theme of moral drift, both individual and communal, bred in a rural European community – the very opposite of what Hillary Clinton meant by “It takes a village.”
One of them, Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon,” you’ve probably heard of. The other you’ll hopefully hear much more about in the months to come: Danish entry “Terribly Happy” is a terrific thriller from Oscar-nominated writer-director Henrik Ruben Genz that has taken its homeland by storm and is ripe for a U.S. remake.
A wickedly comic flipside to Haneke’s solemn social critique, Genz’s film trades in twisty suspense and coal-black humor as it follows the misadventures of Robert (Jakob Cedergren), a mysteriously disgraced Copenhagen cop reassigned to an unwelcoming one-horse town with its own share of nasty secrets.
As Robert gets drawn into the void by a hesitant relationship with abused housewife Ingerlise (Lene Maria Christensen), the film has drawn comparisons to the Coen Brothers of “Blood Simple” and even the David Lynch of “Twin Peaks” in its cool unveiling of the macabre within the mundane.
Director Zhang Yimou’s decision to remake the Coen brothers’ neo-noir modern classic “Blood Simple” is one of the more captivating film-related announcements in recent years. Today we learn that Sony Pictures Classics, which has been in the Yimou business since 1991’s “Raise the Red Lantern,” will distribute the currently untitled film.