We excitedly countdown to the 72nd Festival de Cannes with a different prize winning film each day.
Jagten / The Hunt, 2012
Prix d’interprétation masculine – Mads Mikkelsen
Prix du Jury Œcuménique – Thomas Vinterberg
A teacher in a small town is accused of sexually assaulting a pupil in Thomas Vinterberg’s gripping, alarming drama The Hunt. One would expect suspicion to spread through the town, slowly corroding at the innocent man’s safety and sanity. There’s nothing slow about it, because there’s no suspicion, only certainty.
Children lie all the time – and this victim is, indeed, a liar – but adults are quick to forget this, and don’t once consider that any child could tell such a lie. We are shown how this girl has come to make so dangerous a claim, as from her perspective, in her naivety, it is rash yet reasonable. She will regret it, if not comprehend its consequences entirely.
Her parents and the town’s other adults would rather mete out a most dreadful, extended punishment to the accused than live in the knowledge that she made a silly mistake. Their fear and disgust may provoke fear and disgust in you, since it’s always aggravating to see stupid people use base means to belittle those whom they don’t even try to understand.
Thomas Vinterberg is excellent at stoking outrage in his audience, and his sharp, naturalistic style is central to The Hunt‘s throttling intensity. He ends the film on an interesting note of curious hope, killed by a sting in the tail that emphasises the bleak notion that we are all ruled by our instincts and our emotions, and that the good will always be made to suffer at the hands of the bad.
I might have liked an even bleaker ending. Vinterberg settles into each scene marvellously, and he’s great at creating a subtle tension in moments, augmenting their thematic complexity. He’s less subtle at other times: the head teacher, whose reactions are panicked, pathetic and self-righteous, and whose response causes more damage than anyone else’s. The principal aggressor is the biggest brute in the bunch; the only humorous characters are also the only ones on Lucas’ side. But this is mere nit-picking.
The Hunt is an extremely powerful film, with an outstanding cast, led by Mads Mikkelsen, one of the finest actors in film, and the recipient of the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actor prize in 2012 for his performance here. There is equally brilliant work from Thomas Bo Larsen, and Annika Wedderkopp as the accuser, in an astonishingly nuanced performance; every cast member is magnificent.
Subtlety is one thing, indeed one thing that this film has in droves, but nuance is another – the abstract process of communicating a large array of meanings in a small space of time, even such a large array in a single statement. The Hunt is integrally tethered to its characters’ individual and collective psyches, and responds superbly to the imperative that it must, thus, communicate a large, even boundless array of meanings in each and every scene, shot and gesture.
Vinterberg, so often tempted by a variety of stylisations that befit his career beginnings as a Dogme creator and disciple, stylisations that are more alien to him and thereby less flattering, is always at his best when he hones in on character. And when he depicts those characters with empathy and sincerity, qualities which radiate from this frank and powerful film. 2012 was one of the best years for Cannes’ top competition in recent memory – arguably, one of the best years in history – and The Hunt is one of the 2012 competition’s finest films.