Absent emotional guidance from such audio embellishments, the audience absorbs what’s haunting each teenager, as they anticipate what seems inevitable even as they resist the thought, that one or a few of those mines they will be forced to remove from the beach is likely to explode.
The beauty and silence are underlined by the film’s lack of musical score. Against this backdrop, however, the platoon’s mission is even more disturbing. When the horizon turns cloudy, the whiteness and softness of the sand is punctuated by the deep blue ocean.
Cinematographer Camilla Hjelm presents the landscape with an eye for splendid detail, as well as long takes and captivating wide shots of sand under golden skies. When the platoon of boys first encounters the beach, it’s not only serene in its beauty, but also magnificent. Here, however, the quiet beach serves as the beginning of another assault, conducted during peacetime. Moreover, we can assume the fighting will stop, that an aftermath will provide quiet or a time for reflection. Certainly, other war movies have depicted beachfront battle zones, but in those cases, the action is swift and cacophonous. Even after their military experience, they are too young to be hardened by war or to accept the prospect of death.Īs they look at the beach where they’re going to work, these teenagers’ expressions are of abject fear. Beneath the bruises and scrapes marking whatever hell these boys survived, their faces are soft and their eyes fearful. But Land of Mine complicates this seemingly symmetric objective in order to reveal a more frightening truth: that this claim also served as cover for a form of sadistic punishment.Įarly in the film, a sequence of close-ups introduces a small platoon deployed to remove 40,000 mines from a beach, revealing a number of captured teenage POWs. Repeatedly, Danish officers declare the justice of their order, claiming that bad people planted these mines and now bad people will remove them.
The movie reminds us that, after Denmark was liberated from German occupation near the end of the war, the Danish military deployed several thousand Nazi prisoners of war to remove 1.5 million live landmines the Nazi army had planted across the Danish beachfront. It’s as powerful a denunciation of nationalism’s destructive force as one will see in 2017. A World War II film set on the beaches of Denmark, Martin Zandvliet’s Land of Mine ( Under sandet) destroys such images of beauty. Such a scene offers a perpetually elusive promise of fresh sea air, all night parties and eternal youth. The beach at magic hour - when the sun cascades over magnificent dunes and the tide crashes against the shore - offers a gloriously ethereal escape.