Flammen og Citronen

Does war ever create heroes? Oskar Schindler saved almost 1200 people's lives during World War II, the war that ended by atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that resulted in the massive killing of more than 200000 people. How do we decide who wins, while there are so many lives that ended by ever an unrelated bullet or a bomb? Did we ever really vote 'yes' for the wars?


Now, Flammen og Citronen, meaning Flame & Citron, does not exactly portray the two resistant fighters, Bent Faurschou-Hviid and Jørgen Haagen Schmith, as the ultimate heroes of Danish resistance against Nazis, but it certainly points to that direction if you accept.

The 2008 Danish movie directed by Ole Christian Madsen centers around the two characters of Danish World War II history, Flame and Citron, and is based on actual events and eye-witness accounts. It is quite a heavy movie longer than 2 hours, and is filled with wonderful actings by the two leading actors Thure Lindhardt and Mads Mikkelsen. There is not so much to say about the plot, you can find pretty much the whole story here. It is a modern film noir somehow, where the most important issues are thrust and the capability, legitimization and whether the inevitability, of killing. In a simple way of thinking, it is just another documentation of what most of us already know, about recent history, and yet, it takes you far away to thinking even further more. One of the most impressive aspects of the movie is the character study of the two main characters; especially Mikkelsen's face is all about the inevitable anxiety of their task. Could romance be involved in their lives? Well, that is yet another question, however, one could easily suspect the danger of it in such insecurity.


Even if I try, I can not find a way to really legitimize, in my head, the killing of people, no matter what, however, it gets complicated when there are so many variables involved. The only certain thing is the cruelty to make people 'have to' kill, in a war, or in any circumstance. I do not believe in heroes, I believe that it is a seed of hope, false hope, that those deciding to fight against each other have created, it is a cover for the mess they have created, so that when they decide it yet again, one more time, twice, or more, they can deceive the crowd of real sufferers. When a person finds a way to forever erase the concept of war from mankind's mind, I will willingly call him/her a hero. Until then, the most convincing heroic act is probably Jimi Hendrix' posthumous album called War Heroes.