Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival opening night--Max Manus

[Lydia Leftcoast]

I've liked a lot of the recent Norwegian films that I've seen--the original Insomnia, The Other Side of Sunday (about a young girl growing up in a puritanical branch of the state Lutheran church in the 1960s), Sons (about a former victim of a pedophile who goes vigilante when he suspects that his abuser is "grooming" a young boy), and The Kautokeino Rebellion (cultural clashes between the majority Norwegians and the Sami minority in the 19th century).

Sad to say, of these fine films, only Insomnia and The Other Side of Sunday are available on Netflix.

Tonight's film, chosen as the opening night film for the Festival, was Max Manus, a true story of the Norwegian resistance during World War II. Max initially volunteers to help out the Finns when they are invaded by Russia, but he returns home and joins the resistance when Germany conquers Norway in 1940. At first, he and his friends are aimless and disorganized, but eventually they link up with the organized resistance and are smuggled out of the country for training in Scotland. (The king of Norway had fled to Britain when the country fell.) Throughout the war, Max and his friends carry out daring acts of sabotage and assassination and slip back and forth across the border to neutral Sweden, where the resistance has headquarters at the British consulate. Most of the friends are either killed outright or imprisoned and tortured, but Max always seems to escape somehow. He is the one resistance fighter the Germans really, really want to capture.

When the war ends, he falls into a deep depression, both because of a sort of PTSD and because he feels as if he has no purpose. (This was one of the ways in which the telling of the story differed from the Hollywood approach to storytelling. Instead of "war over--everybody happy," we see Max coming to terms with his life after the war.)

This screening featured a special appearance by Gunnar Sønsteby, the last survivor (at age 91) of the young men portrayed in the movie.

By the way, Max Manus is listed as a "Save" on Netflix, which means that it will probably show up eventually.