Alex Heeney reviews writer-director Gunnar Vikene’s film War Sailor, which is the best kind of war movie: a character drama that happens amidst war, focusing most on how the characters are changed by the atrocities over the years.
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Writer-director Gunnar Vikene’s War Sailor is the best kind of war movie: a character drama that happens amidst war, focusing most on how the characters are changed by the atrocities over the years. It’s not about battle scenes but the uncertainty and terror that comes from knowing you could very well be going to your death. Set mainly from 1939 to 1947, the film follows two Norwegian best friends and sailors: married stalwart Alfred (Kristoffer Joner) and free spirit Sigbjørn (Pål Sverre Hagen) who sign up for merchant marine work in 1939. It’s a few months before the Nazis would occupy Norway, and though they know the sea could be dangerous, they don’t expect to be caught up in the fight.
If you’ve watched 1800s British sea-faring films, you may know that commercial ships would often get forced into becoming military ones during war. You may not know, as I did not, that this was still happening during WWII. Only months into their work aboard a commercial ship, Alfred and Sibjørn find themself in the service of the Allied Forces, transporting explosives across the ocean.
If you see the NFB short The Flying Sailor, also screening this year, in which a ship collides with another ship containing explosives — resulting in the historic Halifax Explosion of 1917 — then you can only imagine that a ship containing explosives would be obliterated by a direct hit from a torpedo. And the Axis has them everywhere.
Read our TIFF review of the short film The Flying Sailor, which is a great companion piece to War Sailor
The Flying Sailor was one of the ten best shorts at TIFF 22.
War Sailor follows Alfred and Sigbjørn as they become irrevocably changed by the war. The film is divided= into a series of chapters, separated by fades to black and often a jump ahead in time by a year,At first, there’s fear for their own lives, never knowing if this mission will be the last one.
Over years, they get inured to human cruelty and tragedy, and have to learn to accept it. Then, there’s the horror of watching other ships capsize, and not being able to rescue all of the survivors. A wonderful little scene finds Alfred and Sigbjørn colluding to delay the repairs to the ship’s engine in order to allow time for survivors to board. The captain doesn’t want to stop for them. Then, it’s watching their own die. Next, they commit atrocities themselves to survive. In one horrifying scene of twisted empathy, they accept food, water, and morphine from the submarine that torpedoed their ship. The people who murdered their colleagues end up rescuing them, if not actually helping them get out of the water.
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Alfred, a family man and a cook by profession — “not a real sailor” according to Sigbjørn — becomes a fatherly presence at sea. When they rescue civilian survivors from a capsized ship, several of them teenagers, he takes it upon himself to care for them. He repeatedly pushes them to get off the ship to safety — as is their right at their age — to no avail. When they keep coming back, he resigns himself to sticking around to do what he can to keep them alive.
There’s a fantastic, heart-pounding sequence when, thinking the teenagers are safe ashore, and aware that their next mission is a particularly dangerous one, Alfred and Sigbjørn and some colleagues decide to escape the ship at night before they unmoor. Every breath and creak the men make could wake their superiors and get them shot, instead of testing their luck or escaping to safety. But when the teenagers unexpectedly return, Alfred gives up the fight.
Telling Alfred’s wife story back home
Through the men’s time at sea, the film regularly cuts back to the story of Alfred’s wife, Cecilia (the great Ine Marie Wilmann of Homesick and Sonja: The White Swan), and their children, fighting their own war. Unlike most war movies where the wife is a token rather than a person, who provides comfort to their husband and worries after him, Cecilia is flesh and blood. She uses her husband’s wages to care for and raise their children, including a newborn. She tries to survive and hopes that Sigbjørn will keep his promise to her, to protect her husband.
When she gets false news that her husband is dead — his ship was torpedoed and so he is assumed dead — she learns to continue without him and without his wages. She gets much less screen time than the men, but enough to remind us that the war didn’t only affect those fighting in it. She spent every day wondering if this would be the day when her children would die.
Even in occupied Norway, it was war
Vikene regularly juxtaposes the battles and explosions the men face at sea with the ones faced at home. Both the men and Cecilia end up in bomb shelters on land, at some point. Both end up surrounded by dead bodies more than once. And both find themselves having to live with the Nazis, while knowing they are the source of all their misery (let alone the other atrocities committed). In one scene, Cecilia and her children, looking starved and exhausted, ride the tram with a group of Nazi soldiers occupying the country. The children stare longingly at the large bar of chocolate that the soldiers share amongst themselves, with little thought for the people next to them who can barely scrounge up basic food, let alone luxuries.
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While Alfred and Sigbjørn begin the film as opposites but brothers in arms, after years, their bond weakens and their personalities shift. Sigbjørn, who was once always keen for adventure, begins to look for stability. At first, he wanted to escape the ship more than Alfred did; now, he does what he must to survive. Alfred’s protective streak means he also gets caught up in some of the worst horrors of their wartime experience, getting PTSD, and newfound rage.
When Alfred hits his breaking point, there’s a great scene in which we follow him from behind as he walks down a public hallway. We don’t know where he’s going, but the tension and defeat radiates from Joner’s shoulders and body, an incredible moment of actor and director being in perfect sync. Once he finds privacy, he collapses and lets it all out. Soon, he disappears, though we don’t know whether or not that’s to his death. By this point, it seems like Alfred and Sigbjørn may have swapped places in their desires for stability and love versus the freedom to be without responsibilities.
The changes in the friends’ outlooks, behaviours, and their relationship continue to echo down through the post-war years when we wonder if they would have been happier living in each other’s shoes. Perhaps, Alfred’s family would have preferred that, too. Wilmann gets the meatiest material to work with here, as someone who has been beaten down from surviving the war and is just looking for comfort and warmth. The war has changed everyone, and War Sailor makes us question if it also means that the relationships and alliances that made sense pre-war still make sense post-war.
The most expensive Norwegian film ever made
Vikene’s film War Sailor is the most expensive Norwegian film ever made, and it looks like it (it’s a multi-country co-production to boot). It looks like millions of dollars, and yet it’s the small scenes that resonate. Yes, there are explosions and large ships and submarines. But you remember a group of people, sitting in a bomb shelter, contemplating their fate. In a year when most TIFF films have been “a group of people in a room” films, War Sailor does the same, but with multiple locations, and more emotional resonance.
These are characters who are trapped by circumstance, so it makes sense the walls are caving in, too. It’s also so well acted and psychologically complex that the blocking of the actors doesn’t need to be at Andrew “blocking is everything” Haigh levels. There are scenes and settings that feel like they were made during COVID concessions — discussions outdoors, an ensemble that may change rooms but doesn’t add many new characters. But it never feels like the filmmaking has been compromised. It’s a war epic that doesn’t feel like a war movie, and it justifies its lengthy two-and-a-half-hour runtime.
Gunnar Vikene’s film War Sailor had its international premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, where we reviewed it as one of the Best Acquisition Titles at the festival. It is still seeking North American distribution.
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