Land of Mine explores a weird battle of wills
Here’s a philosophical poser for you. It’s 1945. The retreating German army has left some 2.2 million landmines buried on the west coast of what was occupied Denmark. Should former soldiers of the Third Reich be conscripted to clear the mines? Or should children be made to do it?
Easy decision, you might think, unless the soldiers are themselves children. This was the situation faced by a number of Allied countries and dramatized by Danish writer-director Martin Zandvliet. The film, cleverly titled Land of Mine, was one of the finalists for the best foreign language Oscar.
Not all the mine-clearing teams were teenage soldiers, but many were; in the final days of the war, an increasingly understaffed Wehrmacht threw ever older and younger recruits into battle
But in the opening scenes of the film, we see that Danish Sgt. Carl Rasmussen (Roland Moller), has no sympathy for the 14 young PoWs under his command. He runs them through a training regimen that leaves one soldier dead — you can see it coming — before moving on to the work at hand. They have to clear a beach of an estimated 45,000 explosives. If they can manage six each per hour, he tells them, they’ll be free to go home in six months.
When the first is critically injured — again, you can see it coming — he cries out for his mother.
The sergeant tries his best to remain pitiless, but watching young men get blown to bits has a way of softening the heart.
What’s more, he keeps getting drawn into conversations with Sebastian (Louis Hofmann), the most charismatic of the bunch. Not that the kid is trying to garner sympathy — he’s just reaching out for some human contact. He even eagerly suggests using a wooden frame to help the work go faster — Rasmussen brushes aside the pitch, but in the next scene we see it’s been quietly implemented.
Land of Mine looks like it was shot on a tight budget — there is but one household in the vicinity of the beach, for instance, comprising a single mother and her little girl — but as the emphasis is on the characters, this is actually a welcome lack of distraction.
The director focuses on the weird, almost subconscious battle of wills between the sergeant, determined to remain blind to the humanity of his charges, and the Germans, who exude youth and naiveté — and, in some scenes, bleed it.