The Hunt by That’s-Where-Life-Is -Boom-Vinterberg – a review

Best Actor at Cannes ’13 for Mads Mikkelsen in The Hunt

The mediocre, rational world is my enemy. Well-adjusted is the thing that I hate. Well-adjusted means fearful and cowardly. Some of my best friends are crazy, they don’t give a shit. Boom! That’s where life is! Boom! – Thomas Vinterberg*

Many journalists, filmmakers, artists and writers try to clear up the cesspool where theories and rumors fester and rot… Myths and clichés are much too common to be left to mere mortals. Beware of the lowest common denominator!

In receiving the 1998 Cannes Palme d’Or for his very first film, The Celebration/Festen, Vinterberg (one of the creators of Dogme 95 – hand-held cameras/no artificial lighting) had much to celebrate. That success though meant the end of Dogme for him: Dogme was over the night Festen opened in 1998, because it was no longer dangerous, no longer innocent, no longer a revolt. It became a fashion, it became a style, which was never the idea. It was an honest attempt to do something naked and pure. – Vinterberg.
Now he is back with another unique film, The Hunt/Jagten, which explores, once more, society’s tenuous equilibrium. While other films like Polanski’s Carnage or Draškovic’s Vukovar Poste Restante have also exposed the unraveling of civility, here it is a small town and a community of friends that, once infested by the virus of fear and paranoia, falls apart.
The main character is played by Mads Mikkelsen – the Danish actor of James Bond fame – winning him the best actor award at the 2013 Cannes festival; he is “good enough” here to become the figure onto whom, like a Rorschach inkblot, everyone is able to project their own insecurities.
So, yes, everything falls apart and it is hard to tell whether, like with entropy, it will ever be glued back**.
In the meantime a series of important questions appear:
What is friendship? What is trust? Who is truly innocent? Are our unchecked suspicions so contagious as to condemn us all to endlessly project our fears and our paranoia onto others?
So it seems, with hysterics and group-think forming the basis for much group cohesion, do-gooders appear to be the most dangerous breed. Please save us from ourselves!
Based on a transcript from “a sexual abuse case,” it is bound to resonate with many viewers.
*Vinterberg quotes, courtesy of The Guardian & Xan Brooks.
**Below, The Pillow Story.

The Pillow Story (from the Jewish Virtual Library):

The harm done by speech is even worse than the harm done by stealing or by cheating someone financially, because amends can be made for monetary harms, but the harm done by speech can never be repaired. For this reason, some sources indicate that there is no forgiveness for lashon ha-ra (disparaging speech). A Chasidic tale illustrates this point: A man went about the community telling malicious lies about the rabbi. Later, he realized the wrong he had done, and began to feel remorse. He went to the rabbi and begged his forgiveness, saying he would do anything he could to make amends. The rabbi told the man, “Take a feather pillow, cut it open, and scatter the feathers to the winds.” The man thought this was a strange request, but it was a simple enough task, and he did it gladly. When he returned to tell the rabbi that he had done it, the rabbi said, “Now, go and gather the feathers. Because you can no more make amends for the damage your words have done than you can recollect the feathers.”

Speech has been compared to an arrow: once the words are released, like an arrow, they cannot be recalled, the harm they do cannot be stopped, and the harm they do cannot always be predicted, for words like arrows often go astray.