The Pleasure of despair

Rating: 10/10 (28 May 2009)

It's a thriller that comes from the northern long winter Scandinavian nights. The rhythm then is slow, but the story is packed with suspense and logical absurd illogicality. The illogicality of criminal minds. It is also Swedish under another light. It is interested in the past, during Hitler's tenure but also after that tenure, after the second world war. In an industrial family with four brothers, three of them turn Nazi, and in modern times, when the story starts and the brother who did not turn Nazi is trying to find out a niece of his who disappeared in the early 60s, one of the three is completely gaga and a recluse, and the other two are no longer present. The business is in the hands of the son of one of the three (who died the day or so when the niece who was his daughter disappeared) and he seems to be a nice gentleman. The main character, a journalist hired to do the job by the non-Nazi brother, finds out his computer is visited by a hacker who sends him some info about his investigation. The two are pairing on the case and find out the truth which is brutal and grossly rude. No details about that. You have to see the film. But the film is fascinating because of this very mesmerizing power of that guilty past that survives even in the present. A Nazi monster will always be a Nazi monster and he will train his own son into the same barbarity. In fact he is a Nazi out of historical coincidence. He is a criminal first of all and he is thankful when history gives him the opportunity to be a criminal hero. The film though is a little bit short about that killer of women being a hater of women. It is generally slightly more complex. Actually the surviving criminal will confess before committing his last crime that it is not hatred for women because he rapes them, he is even demonstrating to them some humane gestures because he is attracted by the hope these victims entertain in those moments and he thoroughly enjoys the feeling he reads in his victims' eyes when they realize there is no hope, they are going to be killed. He finds his pleasure in these silent sentiments and feelings he drinks from the eyes of his victims as if it were some liquor. That's where the film is stronger than we may think. It shows how these criminals have perverted their pleasure into finding it in the utter hatred of their own victims that is only the last light in their eyes when all hope is gone. That's probably what a SS felt in Auschwitz. Sweden is haunted by this past that is shown as being still perfectly present. I am kind of inclined to say that there is no hope because such criminals will always exist and they must be kept away from any lethal tool that they could use on living beings, with the supreme perversion of killing themselves in the very process of killing scores of other people, suicide terrorists and their suicide attacks. The inventor of that kind of terrorism that transformed some volunteers into perambulating killing bombs has just found his human end in Sri Lanka, Prabhakaran, of Maoist inspiration. There is no way to prevent such derangement in some people, we can only do as much as we can to identify them, keep them under surveillance and give them no official occasion to cultivate and satisfy their perversion under some official uniform.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID