Pilou Asbaek…a captive of Somali pirates
“A HIJACKING” My rating: B+ (Opening July 19 at the Tivioli)
103 minutes | MPAA rating: R
There’s not one superfluous moment in the Danish release “A Hijacking,” a terse docudrama handled so realistically and with such quiet insight that you come away from it feeling for the first time that you understand what modern seagoing piracy is all about.
Tobias Lindholm’s film is nerve-wracking without resorting to hackneyed ideas of movie “action.” And it provides tons of insight into not only what it’s like to be a captive sailor held for ransom, but what it’s like to be a corporate bigwig negotiating for his employees’ freedom.
Lindholm’s methodology might at first seem anti-dramatic. He first introduces us to Mikkel (Pilou Asbaek), the chubby, bearded young cook of a Danish cargo vessel plying the Indian Ocean. Mikkel is talking to his girlfriend and his young daughter back in Denmark, looking forward to his return home.
Lindholm doen’t even depict the seizing of Mikkel’s ship and its seven-man crew. We simply become aware that the cook has become a prisoner, confined to a cramped cabin with his ailing captain and the ship’s engineer. The armed pirates refuse to let them use the bathroom, turning their “cell” into a sewer.
Periodically Mikkel is escorted to the galley where he is expected to cook for his captors from an ever-shrinking pantry. (Fact is, we rarely see the pirates, and never very clearly. They’re simply there, just out of sight.) (more…)
Butler's Cinema Scene 