Land of Mine review: Underdogs caught on the wrong side of history
★★★½
MA, 101 minutes
When first introduced, Sergeant Rasmussen of the Danish Army is behaving with a brutishness familiar from countless Hollywood war movies featuring brutish sergeants.
Roland Muller as Sergeant Rasmussen, the kind of brutish officer we've seen before in film, with his charges.
Moustache bristling and chin thrust out, he hauls a young man out of a line of dejected German POWs and their Danish collaborators and beats him viciously enough to suggest he holds him personally responsible for Denmark's six years of German occupation.
He's angry. And he's about to take charge of a group of young German soldiers, most of them teenagers, who have been sent to Denmark's west coast to help clear it of landmines – even though they've received only rudimentary training.
It's a harrowing story neatly shaped into melodrama by Danish writer-director Martin Zandvliet. It's clear from the beginning, for instance, that Sergeant Rasmussen will eventually undergo a radical change of heart and that a large proportion of the naive young solders under his command will be dead by then. But the menacing stretch of white sand where they spend their days and the bleak shed where they're locked away at night are so thoroughly infused with dread and pain that you're inclined to park any reservations you might have about the script's formulaic style until it's done with you.
And it's a little known tale. Go online and you can read about the way the Danes denied food and care to their German refugees, most of them women and children, after the war. And there are references to the German engineering units who did much of the mine clearing, but it's hard to find anything about these young soldiers. Yet if it were not wholly true, why would the Royal Danish Army, which co-operated with Zandvliet and his crew, promote a piece of fiction which throws such a harsh light on its past?
Rasmussen is not the only vengeful Danish soldier on show. His superior officers are much more implacable, accusing him of insubordination for feeding the boys from army stores. And it's not as if he's being generous. At this stage, they're so ravaged by hunger pains that they're in danger of blowing themselves up by vomiting into the mines' mechanisms.
We get to know a little about the dynamics of the group and the lives they hope to return to. Ernst and Werner (Emil and Oskar Belton) are twins who dream of setting up business together, Sebastian (Louis Hoffman), the only one who dares to speak up to Rasmussen, is an intellectual from a wealthy background, and Helmut (Joel Basman), the oldest, has a grudge against authority in general.
They're underdogs caught on the wrong side of history, with a job doomed to failure. The majority of Denmark's landmines were cleared less than five years ago.
Sandra Hall is the author of two novels (A Thousand Small Wishes and Beyond the Break), two histories of the Australian television industry (Supertoy and Turning On, Turning Off) and Tabloid Man, a biography of Ezra Norton, the man who established Truth and The Daily Mirror. She was film critic at The Bulletin magazine prior to joining The Sydney Morning Herald in 1996.