Film review: In a Better World (Director: Susanne Bier)

How to respond when faced with injustice, with oppression, with violence? Should one strike back or turn the other cheek? These are the questions Susanne Bier asks in her new film In a Better World. The original title gives a better clue as to what the film is about: Haevnen - revenge.

Two families are in its center: On one side the twelve-year-old Christian who just lost his mother to cancer and accuses his father of having given her up. Then there's Christian's classmate Elias, victim of a gang of school bullies, with separated parents and a father who spends much of the year in Africa, treating patients in a tent pretending to be a makeshift hospital.

Everybody has their reasons- and targets - for revenge: Christian the hated father, both boys the chief bully, Elias' father Anton the warlord who cuts open pregnant women who Anton cannot save, Elias' mother her husband who cheated on her. Later a playground argument turns into a violent confrontation between Anton and a car mechanic in which the former does indeed turn the other cheek. The boys, Christian especially, go another way: meeting violence with violence and believing in the right to vengeance. However, when the warlord turns up looking for Anton's help, his choice is different from his earlier one.

Susanne Bier goes through the different responses with a high degree of virtuousity, sets them against each other, brings them into conflight, in a rhythmically compelling crescendo, culminating in the boys' act of vengeance. She uses an elaborate color scheme, cold blues and warm yellows alternate in an almost disconcerting way. Little is certain, least of which is what right and wrong actually mean.

William Johnk Nielsen as Christian is the centerpiece of the film, the catalyst. An intelligent but hardened boywith an unusual measure of self-control only half-concealing the explosive anger inside. He is like an angel of vengeance, relentless, unforgiving, determined to hunt down and punish those who, in his opinion, have done wrong. He detests what he regards as the adults' weakness in what is also a clash of the young versus the older. The boys weigh the rationalism, the pacifying of the adults against their own brutal reality and find it way too light.

For most of the film, the two basic responses receive equal weight and value, there is no clear tiiping of the scales. Both sides have their reasons, and pretty good ones, too.

However, when the boys' plot backfires, the balance collapses. Predictably, the film comes down on the side of the opponents of violence.After initial hard feelings and suffering on all sides, everybody forgives each other and all is in harmony. After asking all those hard questions earlier, the final answers are disappointingly easy. One wonders if they can work in our highly developed society - they certainly don't in Africa which is why the answer there, the decision Anton makes, is different, much less black and white. And it's hard to discard the impression that this answer might be just a little more honest.