Veteran French actor Denis Lavant boldly takes on his first Swedish-language role in John Skoog’s Redoubt, a compellingly bizarre based-on-reality story set in rural Sweden at the height of the Cold War. Whether he pulls off the accent and dialogue with conviction is almost incidental, because Lavant’s grizzled, mottled, soulfully melancholy features are a great fit for this fable-like portrait of an obsessive backwoods misfit diligently preparing for a possible nuclear apocalypse.
Unashamedly art-house in look and tone, Skoog’s first narrative feature shares some of the same open-ended approach as his long-form debut, the experimental documentary Ridge (2019), a dreamy midsummer meditation on the Swedish landscape. Both films were shot by the same Polish cinematographer, Ita Zbroniec-Zajt, who does great work here with deliciously rich 35mm monochrome. Headlining the international co-production credits on Redoubt is Plattform, the team behind prize-winning Swedish auteur Ruben Östlund (Triangle of Sadness), which should help this rarefied drama reach a discerning audience following its world premiere at San Sebastian film festival this week. Sales deals have already been sealed for much of Europe, China and South Korea.
Redoubt is lightly punctuated with visual and verbal quotes from If War Comes, a long-running civil defence pamphlet first issued by the Swedish government during World War II, which gave citizens general advice about how to react in the event of a major crisis or invasion. The pamphlet was delivered to every household between 1943 and 1991, when fear of nuclear war with nearby Soviet Russia was a regular daily concern. It was discontinued after the Cold War ended, but updated and reactivated in 2018. This local cultural context is not crucial to enjoying Skoog’s film, though it will likely strike a deeper nostalgic note with Swedish viewers.
Lavant plays a fictionalised version of a real local legend familiar to Skoog from childhood, Karl-Göran Persson, an eccentric farmhand who lived near the director’s home town of Kvidinge in southern Sweden. Galvanised by Cold War warnings about possible nuclear attack, Karl sets about constructing a ramshackle shelter in his remote cottage home, notionally to protect not just himself but also his fellow villagers.
Lacking money or professional skills, Karl must build his fortress of solitude from scrap metal, scavenged wood, old bicycle parts, used car tyres and other makeshift junk. This erratic construction process becomes the film’s main narrative thread, propelling a scrappy plot along on a clatter of metallic clanks, scrapes, thumps and twangs. With heavy focus on the physicality and texture of the materials, these scenes achieve a kind of rhythmic flow, an audiovisual symphony of musique concrete. At times the effect is like watching a feature-length adaptation of the Tom Waits song, “What’s He Building?”
Skoog and Lavant present Karl as an eccentric oddball on the fringes of society, but fired by a keen sense of community spirit. He appears to well-liked by the local villagers. especially the children, with a fondness for bursting into drunken song at summer festivals. He is occasionally mocked and bullied by cruel teenagers, but mostly admired for his good heart and single-minded perseverance. As one of the background chorus of fellow farm workers notes admiringly, watching Karl toiling under the hot sun, “he’s a persistent little bastard.”
If Redoubt sometimes feels more like an artwork than a narrative feature, that is no surprise. Skoog is primarily a visual artist and this project started life as a prize-winning 2014 video installation. This reworked and expanded version still has one foot in the gallery. Indeed, the director and his team worked with local craftsmen to recreate Karl’s fortified farmhouse from scratch, an organic artisan approach not far removed from their subject, who was arguably more outsider artist than builder.
Redoubt certainly works better as impressionistic collage than coherent drama. The narrative remains thin and episodic throughout, with no clear closure. The setting is apparently the 1960s but Skoog gives us little firm sense of place or time, with no hint of Karl’s back story, or how his madly ambitious Fitzcarraldo-style passion project played out beyond an elliptical, wintry coda set a decade after the main events. Perhaps because biographical details on the real Karl are so opaque, viewers are very much left to draw their own conclusions.
On the positive side, Redoubt is full of extraordinary visual tableaux. A scene of Karl threshing hay in a barn under shafts of sunlight could be an Old Master canvas. Another striking sequence finds him trying to saw down a massive tree single-handedly. his puny frame dwarfed by its vast girth. A slow panning glide along the heavy rubber belt linking a tractor to a hay-bailing machine is another elegant flourish. For sheer painterly poetry, this is a very rewarding film. Skoog’s use of children’s voice-over clips as an intermittent framing device also lend his engagingly offbeat yarn an extra magical dimension, falling somewhere between Nordic fairy tale and fuzzy collective folk memory.
Director: John Skoog
Screenwriters: Kettil Kasang, John Skoog
Cast: Denis Lavant, Agnieszka Podsiadlik, Livia Millhagen, Aron Skoog
Cinematography: Ita Zbroniec-Zajt
Editing: Jussi Rautaniemi, John Skoog
Music: Amina Phocine
Producers: Erik Hemmendorf, Caroline Drab
Production company: Plattform Produktion (Sweden)
World Sales: Coproduction Office, Paris
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (New Directors)
In Swedish
81 minutes
