Hamsun

Knut Hamsun is Norway's greatest writer, a Nobel laureate, a source of national pride. When Germany occupies Norway in 1940 he takes the side of the occupiers. The hostility he has felt towards England since his youth is decisive in that choice. His wife Marie speaks in Germany throughout the war. Hamsun defends national socialist ideas yet objects to Norwegians being jailed and executed, and the film records that contradiction too. Jan Troell's film is neither an acquittal nor a lynching; it watches an old man turn from a hero into a traitor in the eyes of his own country. His audience with Hitler is the bitterest scene in it. When the war ends he is tried and convicted. Max von Sydow plays Hamsun and Ghita Nørby plays Marie; the real subject is as much Norway's reckoning with itself as the marriage of those two.