Everything is about to rot in the state of Denmark. The sea is rising, water is starting to bubble out of the ground and a decision has been made: the entire country is going to be dismantled and turned into a wind farm, its six million inhabitants sent to whichever country will accept them.
Thomas Vinterberg’s grimly prophetic seven-part series Families Like Ours follows timeworn convention by whittling down a macro issue — one we find too big to think about, mostly — to the stories of a few individuals. The families of the title are a rondel of comfortably-off Danes who never expected to want for anything, let alone a country: an architect and his wife who think they will be able to transfer their lives to Paris; the wife’s brother and his husband, who have the advantage of advance knowledge of the government’s plans; the architect’s depressive ex-wife who must go to Romania, the short straw offered to people who need government help to emigrate.
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At the center of things, this woman’s daughter must choose between the two parents, each of them needy in different ways, and thus between Paris and Bucharest. Her new boyfriend is determined to follow her, wherever she goes. It is this young couple’s desperate, dangerous treks across Europe to find each other that become the leading narrative in what is essentially a collection of experiences.
The evacuation process is all very Nordically organized, with few hints of the looting, battles for places on departing boats or inevitable rebel hold-outs that would almost certainly make the real thing chaos, but would also clutter Vinterberg’s jigsaw of stories. From that point, however, each fictional family nosedives into its own tragedy. Young Laura (Amaryllis August) flip-flops on her choice between her parents, misses her boat and disappears. Her father Jacob (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), who has managed to get an under-the-counter job in Paris, immediately does the Danish thing: he goes to the police, bringing dire official attention on the French architect who risked his business to give him a job. “You are two very spoiled people,” Jacob’s benefactor snaps as he turns the family out onto the street.
It’s true. These people are the most privileged refugees imaginable. Over the first six relentless episodes of Families Like Ours, we watch them unravel or commit hitherto unthinkable acts of savagery that turn them into people they used to despise. By episode three, the mounting hopelessness makes you wonder why they aren’t just throwing themselves into the encroaching briny. So it is a punishing watch but, at the same time, there is an uneasy sense of contrivance. How is it that everybody blunders unerringly into the worst possible choices? It is as if all these First World losers are obliged to keep adding to the plot’s misery count until their souls are cleansed.
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Fans of Vinterberg’s Danish films — which include the Oscar-winning Another Round — will enjoy the familiarity of his favored set pieces: a wedding dance, crowds bursting into harmonious song, the echoing vastness of a church.
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There is also a kind of comfort in seeing so many of the remarkable actors who came to international prominence with the Dogma movement: Paprika Steen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, David Denrick, Magnus Millang. All are now well into middle age, but peerless in their ability to convey waves of half-smothered emotion through the twitch of an eyebrow or the sag of a jaw. Whatever the situation, their hallmark naturalism convinces us that life is being lived here, moment to perilous moment.
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The same can’t be said for the central young couple. Vinterberg clearly wants to stake a claim to optimism by suggesting that even through an apocalypse, love will prevail. In fact, nothing between them suggests a connection that would last a week.
As Elias, Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt’s puppyish vigor is appealing, but there is zero chemistry with Amaryllis August, a model in her first significant acting role. Laura is the story’s moving force, but August’s beautiful face is a wide-eyed blank. Not that the script gives her much help; we see very little of the couple’s togetherness before events and their own inevitably bad decisions overtake them.
Only in the last episode is there a sense that some of these walking wounded will not just survive, but manage to make something out of having nothing. The weakest of them may find strength; the greatest sinners may achieve some measure of redemption. But the most poignant moments here have nothing to do with the characters, in fact: they are the panoramic scenes of an empty Copenhagen, its highways silent and windows dark. The destruction of an entire country by climate change is a huge, urgent prospect. Maybe it is just too huge to conjure in the confines of a television drama about a few individuals whose lifelong good luck – being born Danish – has run out.
Title: Families Like Ours
Festival: Venice (Series, Out of Competition)
Director: Thomas Vinterberg
Screenwriters: Thomas Vinterberg, Bo Hr. Hansen
Cast: Amaryllis August, Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Paprika Steen, Helene Reingaard Neumann, Magnus Millang, Esben Smed, David Dencik, Thomas Bo Larsen, Asta Kamma August
Sales agent: Studiocanal
Running time: 5 hr 45 mins (7 episodes)