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Terribly Happy (Frygtelig Lykkelig)

Written by Zombie Boy

Friday, 01 January 2010 02:49

The first thing you need to know is that the title Terribly Happy is an object lesson in irony: there is not a single happy thing that happens in this film. Anything that seems even minorly pleasant quickly descends into a world of poo. Imagine seeing a glitter of light winking at you from a mud puddle. You bound over in the hopes of finding a pearl or some other equally neat trinket, but when you yank it out you find it is a human clavicle. Your mom’s, as it turns out. You didn’t even know she was dead. Then a car drives by and splashes the mud all over you. And then you get cancer. That’s what watching this movie is like. But does that make it a bad film? Quite the contrary. It is beautifully shot and hits every emotional beat out of the park. It just happens to be depressing as hell. I don’t know. Maybe it is a Dutch thing.

Robert Hansen is a cop, but just barely: after catching his wife in the sack with another cop and pulling his gun on them both, he gets a job policing his very own cell in a sanatorium. After some cool down time he is given a probationary assignment in a small town outside Toden (unnamed in the film), with the hopes of showing his superiors he can keep the peace enough to earn his ticket back to Copenhagen. His wife won’t take his calls and his young daughter thinks he is in Australia (as he explains later, it was the farthest country his wife could think of) so he has some incentive to keep his nose clean.

Robert quickly discovers that the small cow-town in South Jutland has its own particular and peculiar ways of operating. When a shoplifter is caught in the local grocery, the policy is to call the marshal. But no one expects the marshal to make an arrest or file a report. He is expected to cuff the whippersnapper in the face and send him off to think about what he has done. In most ways, this story is akin to an American western. The residents wear cowboy hats and denim jackets, and believe in frontier justice and taking care of your own business. In a lot of ways the town is full of grown children: they’re all sort of play-acting at their adult roles in the town, and expect the same from their new marshal. This flies in the face of Robert’s desire to do everything by the book, and makes him a bit of a pariah in town.

Robert and Ingerlise: The not-so-happy couple.

And as any town full of children is wont to have, there is the local bully, Jorgen. The town quack, as the doctor refers to himself, tells Robert that he sees many broken bones from the hands of Jorgen but hey, who the hell is going to report him? Robert doesn’t understand at this point that that is just the way of the town. But he gets it, and in a hurry. When he meets Ingerlise. Jorgen’s wife. Ingerlise takes an immediate shine to Robert, which is not fate or kismet, merely due to the fact that he is new in town. Ironically, they first meet at the bicycle shop, where the manager, another person who was relatively new, has recently disappeared. There is an intimation here that won’t be fully realized til the end of the film.

Robert and Jorgen: A reverse-pissing contest.

Ingerlise’s daughter, Dorothe, is the only splash of color in the film. Her Little Red Riding Hood coat is a crimson blotch on the earth-tone palette of the movie. I’ll let you work out the symbology yourself. Anyway, whenever the creak-creak of her doll’s carriage can be heard around the town, the residents know she is taking a walk while her mother is getting her faced pounded into new and exciting shapes. This is just another thing they ignored, because they let people work out their own business. But when she makes a desperate plea to Robert to get her out of the town, something apocalyptically stupid and epically tragic happens. You won’t see it coming and you will watch the film with entirely new eyes when it does. I guarantee it. .

From this point forward, things are on an express car to hell. Someone is dead and the town wants justice, but their own brand. Robert knows that the situation is not what they think it is, and in yet another ironic twist (sensing a theme here?) he intervenes as some of the residents attempt to march Jorgen out to the bog, a mythical place in the town where items such as boots, cars, and people frequently sink and are never seen again. After Robert chases the would-be avengers off, Jorgen looks just past the camera and says, “You shouldn’t have done that.” Jorgen knows the way things work, and that Robert has put a crimp in the space-time continuum, to borrow sci-fi parlance, and that there will be paradoxical consequences.

The last act of the film is essentially all of the issues of the main characters having a 50 car pile-up in the intersection of Truth Ave and Personal Agenda Drive. The doctor had been prescribing a curious amount of pills for people, Jorgen is well-known for being no angel, Robert is guilty of some dark acts himself, and even Robert’s superior, who sent him to the boggy town in the first place, does not have entirely clean hands. They all use Dorothe as the lynch-pin of their arguments for self-preservation, but it is clear that no one gives a frog’s fart what happens to her. She is just another convenient pawn in their game of Personal-Responsibility-Evasion Chess.

It always comes down to a gun for Robert.

I’ve gotten so caught up in the goings on in the film, that I have failed to mention how beautiful it is. Having extremely limited knowledge of Denmark, I as surprised by how much like a small Midwest American town it resembled. The director, Henrik Ruben Genz, loves wide-angle tableaus, and in such a mundane setting the effect is intriguing, and he often uses the technique to show the distance between characters. Along with the aforementioned color-scheme involving Dorothe, it is also important to note that there is not a full-on shot of Robert until he settles in his room in town. In the car in the beginning we only get a profile, and as he makes his way from the car to the house we get a series of canted, subjective angles.

In the end the film is an examination of what a pitcher plant morality can be: rigid morals can land you in trouble, but overly plastic ethics lead to just as much, if not more, chaos. One horrible mistake, unless made right immediately, can turn into a black hole and suck everything good and decent out of you into the vortex. The case could be made that Robert is entering Hell as he enters the town, and sees his sins replayed from the other side of the mirror. Either way, he finds himself trapped in his deeds, with unscalable walls and a pit of acid under his feet. This film will leave you with plenty to think about…as soon as you feel up to facing the world again, of course.

And a big PS to the posters at that den of iniquity that are the forums at IMDb: This film only bears resemblance to Hot Fuzz in that Hot Fuzz was inspired in part by The Wicker Man, which Terribly Happy has much more in common with. kthanxbye.

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