Hævnen (2010)

What drives people to revenge? This seems to be the central question of Susanne Bier's recent film Hævnen (In a Better World). Even though serious moral questions are placed at the core, this is not a completely satisfying film (would I have liked it better as a novel? Maybe.). Two conflicts play out, one in Denmark, and one in a refugee camp (in Darfur?) and the point seems to be to shed some light on violence, how violence is sparked or how it could be rejected. Bier refrains from providing one overarching idea. Instead, one could say that she tests our reactions (I am inspired by this reading of the film.) A prominent temptation is to present moral problems as given questions to which universal answers are to be provided: "is it right to....?" Well, is it or is it not? When these type of questions are set up, one starts to imagine a situation as comprising a bunch of facts. Then the task is to churn out the optimal solution in accordance with a principle or a standard. Moral problems then seem identical with problems in engineering, it's just that principles mess things up with their fact-value fuzziness. (If you read moral philosophy, you are bound to bump into this understanding of what moral problems are.)

In my opinion, Bier does not open up that kind of approach. One of the stories are about two boys who have made up their minds to blow up a man's car. They have both witnessed the man hitting their father, twice. One of the boys start to question the plan, but the other boy insists that they have to go through with it. And so they do, and irrevocably bad things are about to happen. Was it right to do it or does the film instead show that revenge is always bad? That would be to simplify what is going on.

In many films, vengeance is portrayed as an unstoppable force, an ineluctable expression of human nature. A temporary equilibrium might be reached, but these films always hint at the inevitable moral functioning of human beings. - This is not at all Bier's point of view; some of the best scenes involve the tension between the two boys. One of them tries to talk the other out of it, to make him change perspectives. The boy persists, and persuades his friend to be complicit in the crime. One of the boys is blinded by rage (we learn that this rage is deeply rooted in him). The other boy loses his clear-sighted reaction. - - It is important that these descriptions in terms of 'blinded by' or 'clear-sighted' is my own reaction - it is not a matter of neutral judgments.

The problem with Hævnen is that too often, it resorts to conventional, soapy drama where one tense situation is followed by another, one problematic relation is put on top of another. For this reason, many aspects are dealt with superficially. The scenes in the refugee camp, for example, risk being swallowed up by the moral drama in Denmark, so that this story about vengeance and medical ethics is reduced to a mere shadow of the central story about the two boys and their plot. And this type of juxtaposition also comes close to the pitfall the film otherwise stays clear of: vengeance is a part of human nature, it is a universal phenomenon and no good intentions can stop these destructive chains (Bier's attempt to portray reconciliation is not that convincing as it follows too many film conventions - the whole thing appears half-hearted).