Inheritance¶
324 words on Films
With Scandinavian film days currently running at a local arts cinema, which is conveniently just down the road, I watched another film tonight after yesterday’s excursion. A Danish film again, Arven (Inheritance). As the title suggests, someone dies. His death causes a bit of trouble to his family.
This sounds a bit like the first Dogma film, Festen, and both films even share the main actor, Ulrich Thomsen, but otherwise the films are different. The family is a rich industrial family in the steel industry with a large plant. Their son Christoffer decided to skip being an industrialist and entertain himself by running a restaurant or two in Stockholm where he lives with his pretty actress girlfriend/wife.
After his father’s death, his mother orders him to save the steel plant, apparently not trusting her daughter’s husband to do the job. Her son – although seemingly not too competent – accepts the job and risks his marriage that way as his wife isn’t too happy in the comfortable and boring life of a rich housewife. While the company doesn’t go bust, he manages to arrange a fusion with another one as his bank wishes. He fires hundreds of people, including those relatd to the family for a long time. Probably he does as well as anybody else would have done.
His work makes him unhappy, but he doesn’t leave it, his wife leaves him to go back to Stockholm on stage and I assume his mom is happy as she didn’t like his wife anyway…
A bit sad, really. You see the rich kid who looks like he freed himself made the best of his fortune and he throws it away because he’s stuck in his family connections after all.
Look out for the scene where Christoffer tells the employees about his father’s death and they all take off their helmets. Hundreds of people taking off their work helmets. Looks cool.
