There were immigrants to America who thought the streets would be paved with gold. Lasse Karlsson, a middle-aged farmhand from Sweden, has more modest hopes as he sails with his young son to Denmark in the early years of this century. In Denmark, he says, they will drink coffee in bed on Sunday mornings, and eat roast pork with raisins for Sunday dinner. He cradles his son, Pelle, in his arms as their little passenger vessel noses into a small harbor, where disappointment sets in almost at once.Almost everyone on the boat is a Swedish laborer, looking for work. Farmers have turned out to inspect them as if they were cattle.

 

One by one, the men are hired, until finally only Lasse and Pelle are left. Nobody wants to hire Lasse (Max von Sydow). He is too old. He has a son. Half-drunk and defiant, he all but forces himself on the last of the farmers, a man named Kongstrup who has a shifty look about him.Lasse and Pelle sit in the farmer’s cart as it passes through fields on its way to their futures.“Pelle the Conqueror” uses this beginning, full of hope and dreams, in an interesting way. Through the seasons that follow during a long year on the Kongstrup farm, the vision somehow stays alive inside Pelle, even though life seems organized to disappoint him. The film begins with one hopeful immigration - Sweden to Denmark - and ends with another, Pelle’s decision to take his chances in the larger world.

 

Life on the Kongstrup farm is defined by the land, the seasons, and the personalities of the people who live there. The Kongstrups themselves hardly appear for long stretches of time; they live in a big house set aside from the farm buildings, and Mrs. Kongstrup spends her days drinking brandy while her husband chases wenches. He has no shame, not even about the one unfortunate woman who appears at his front door from time to time, their child in her arms.In the quarters where the laborers live, life is defined by the sadism of the “Manager” (Erik Paaske), a bully who spots weaknesses in his men and exploits them. He is assisted in his cruelty by the “Trainee,” a youth who takes particular pleasure in tormenting Pelle.The boy turns to his father for protection, but Lasse is too old and too weary to help. Eventually Pelle makes his own alliances for friendship and protection.

“Pelle the Conqueror,” which won the Grand Prix at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, was adapted by Bille August, whose previous film, “Twist and Shout,” was about teenagers coming of age in the 1960s. In tone and sometimes in visuals, the movie resembles “The Emigrants” and “The New Land” (1974), Jan Troell’s two-part epic about Scandinavians who settled in Minnesota. Both films star Max von Sydow, that mighty oak of Swedish cinema, who is unsurpassed at the difficult challenge of appearing not to act, of appearing to be simple and true even in scenes of great complexity.

 

The film is a richness of events. There are scenes of punishingly hard work in the fields, under the eye of the Manager. A challenge between the Manager and an independent-minded worker, with tragic results. The intrigue in the big house, where Mrs. Kongstrup exacts a particularly ironic revenge for her husband’s philandering. The heartbreak of a beautiful local girl, who has fallen in love above her station.The most touching sequence in the film involves a winter’s romance between Lasse and a sailor’s wife who lives in a cottage near the sea.Pelle is the first to meet the woman, whose husband has been missing for years and is presumed dead. He introduces his father to her, and the two people take a liking to one another that is practical as well as sentimental. There is a scene of great delicacy and sensible realism, in which they evaluate their resources and decide they should live together, and afterwards Lasse is able to suggest with a smile to his son that they might soon be having coffee in bed on Sundays after all.

 

Von Sydow’s work in the film has been honored with an Academy Award nomination for best actor, well deserved, particularly after a distinguished career in which he stood at the center of many of Ingmar Bergman’s greatest films (“The Virgin Spring,” “The Seventh Seal”).But there is not a bad performance in the movie, and the newcomer, Pelle Hvenegaard, never steps wrong in the title role (there is poetic justice in the fact that he actually was named after the novel that inspired this movie). It is Pelle, not Lasse, who is really at the center of the movie, which begins when he follows his father’s dream, and ends as he realizes he must follow his own.

 

La critique des spectateurs d'ImDB

 

 

Deserves all the awards it won

 

Author: szavo-2 from england

25 March 1999

I was very surprised to see there is only one comment for this film despite of many awards it won. I watched it several years ago, but I can still feel the winter sunshine of Denmark and the boy (I really felt as he felt)who acted as if there were no script or camera around. The scene(you have to see it),the half-witted boy volunteered to get beaten,still keeps me thinking. I wish I was an English to express well enough. I cannot say this is my favorite, but for the first and the last time, I watched a film with intense near physical pain. I don't know whom to recommend but watch it when you feel calm rather than feel good. But it's not depressing at all.

By Hal Hinson

Washington Post Staff Writer

December 23, 1988

 

In Bille August's "Pelle the Conqueror," Max von Sydow is so astoundingly evocative that he makes your bones ache. This is a performance that comes from the joints and ligaments; it's conceived in marrow.

 

Von Sydow has so completely entered the body of this old man, who has come from Sweden around the turn of the century to settle with his young son Pelle (Pelle Hvenegaard) as virtual slaves on a farm in Denmark, that he seems physically transformed. Based on Martin Andersen Nexo's Danish novel, "Pelle" has the expansiveness of an epic, but von Sydow keeps it centered in the personal. There's such detail in his work that you can almost measure the temperature in the stable where he lives by the color in his cheeks. You don't have to see the cruelty of the life that he and his son have left behind; it's in the slope of the old man's pinched, narrow shoulders.

 

In leaving home, father and son may in fact have fallen on even harsher conditions. The servitude that the old man -- whose name is Lasse -- has entered into entitles him and his boy to treatment little better than that given to the animals. (The animals, in fact, probably endure less abuse and get better feed.) The elements become a vivid character in the drama; the emotions are keyed to the seasons and the changes in the landscape. The triumph of Jorgen Persson's cinematography is that it conveys not only the pewter skies and melancholy beauty of the Danish countryside, but its unrelenting rawness as well. When the wife of the farm's owner howls in the night over her husband's philandering, her wails mix with the rampaging winds and the lowing cattle.

 

August gives this coming-of-age story a ritualistic quality. Soon after Lasse and his son arrive, the farm's manager trainee humiliates the young boy with insults, whipping him and driving him out into the courtyard. Tending the boy's wounds, Lasse promises a violent revenge, but when confronted by the trainee he backs down. The sight of Lasse's impotence marks a turning point for Pelle; the father seems to shrink before him, to become even older, and the pain of seeing him diminished is even greater than that of the whip.

 

If August had been able to enter into it to the extent that von Sydow has entered into Lasse, the movie might have been a classic. Instead, the film's drama feels far away. Though Lasse and his son are the protagonists, August introduces us to other characters and other stories, and none of them has the resonance of the central one. The boy, too, has an intelligent, open face, but it's not memorable or especially expressive. There are moments to marvel at and stunning images -- like the ghostly shot of a boat with its passenger frozen dead on board -- but there are common elements to all immigrant stories, and August doesn't have the talent or the empathy to transcend the familiarity. Watching, we feel as if we've seen too much of it before.

 

It's for von Sydow, primarily, that the picture is notable. Von Sydow's face, long familiar to movie lovers from his work with Bergman, now looks like that of El Greco's Christ. He gives Lasse's insignificance a touch of grandeur -- and of comedy. When he calls on a local woman whose husband has been lost at sea for a year, he suddenly seems younger. His posture changes and he takes on a sort of shabby courtliness -- he becomes a gent. The full extent of Lasse's dream of a happy life is a cup of coffee in bed on Sundays. But Pelle's dreams are grander -- he wants to conquer the world, which within the context of the movie means leaving his father and going to America. Watching von Sydow as he helps the boy pack, we wonder at how such simplicity of gesture can convey such emotion. As Lasse, his style has the essence of poetic compression. One shot, of Lasse in his undershirt, his back to the camera, has the full weight of tragedy in it.

 

Copyright The Washington Post

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Max von Sydow has probably been given proper recognition for his body of work in Europe, but I don't think we have acknowledged that talent sufficiently in America.This is a superbly made film for which more knowledgeable reviewers than I can make appropriate comments concerning everything from the original story line to the scenic shots covering changing weather and the years of growth of all the characters.

 

My only contribution is this: Where else do you have a male lead role where certain aspects of being a hero are necessary to the role, yet the fact of the story is that the male lead is failing in almost every, public aspect of his life. Mr. von Sydow pulls it off. He is a failure, yet he has the stature of a hero and it's not just in the eyes of his adolescent son.

 

I don't think any of the current generation of male leads could have made this film--perhaps Costner perhaps Newman.But that's my point;if any of them had crafted this performance, they would have received recognition. Max von Sydow gave the performance of a lifetime and we didn't even know where to classify the film. The film and the male lead should have won for best in class in the year of release. As another reviewer has noted -- this is a gem.

 

 

 

Sometimes I stumble on a movie which all of the sudden turns out to be a real masterpiece. Pelle the Conqueror really surprised me – touching story told in a unique way. Pelle is a boy from Sweden who immigrates to Denmark with his dad after the death of his mother. They are both full of hope – hope for a new beginning – and there is a scene in the boat on which Pelle wants to hear over and over about the new country they will be living at: "Tell me about it again, papa. It's very different this new country.

 

- You'll hardly… - You'll hardly believe your eyes. They put raisins in the pork roastand butter on your bread…Some places they put butter on your bread.- And kids are free all day.

 

- Yes, Pelle, yes. Wages are so incredibly high, that kids…That kids don't have to work."

 

It sounds too good to be true – may be not for you – but imagine what those words meant for a boy who is used to live in a missy , probably due to the hard life he had to live after the death of his mother. As soon as the boat reaches the shore the reality of this new world came out of the dream mist. Finding employment is not as easy especially considering the age of the Pele's father and the fact that he has a small boy with him. At the end they are offered an employment at a large farm, but find the life would present many challenges to them.

 

 

I watched this movie with constant hope to see happiness in the eyes of Pelle and the moments in which he felt happy was shining like a real diamonds surrounded by the dust of the harsh live he had to deal with. Although Pelle is often refused friendships from the local Danish boys he shows his good heart befriending a boy who has some physical disability and their friendship through a little odd at times shows that people can find someone to care for  even in the toughest places.

 

Pelle the Conqueror is classic movie and although some may thing that the story gets a bit depressing at times I recommend it to anyone who treasure excellent coming of age movies

 

 

Pelle The Conqueror is one of the best films I have ever seen. The story describes the journey of Lasse Karlsson(Max Von Sydow), and his little boy, Pelle, as they move from Sweden to Denmark. In Denmark, they hope to find a better life than in Sweden. Lasse Karlsson and his boy, however, find the Danish life brutal and hard. Finding work on a large farm, Pelle and his father struggle to survive. Pelle The Conqueror is about more than their life on this farm. It is more about the dreams of this young boy, and the inspiration, and determination he gains from his first journey. And it is at the same time about how Pelle eventually needs to move on from his father and find more from life. What a magical movie.

 

 

 

 

In our days where every director tries to copy the Hollywood way of film making, 'Pelle' freshens our spirits like a healthy European winter breeze. It's all that what Old World cinema stands for: thought-provoking, real and full of silent passion. Both actors are marvelous in their roles, and especially Max von Sydow who has played every character from super-villains to torn crusaders in his career gives a performance that will forever shine out as a master example that you don't have to pretend you're a death sick, blind, and mentally retarded neurotic alcoholic to win at least the Oscar nomination.